Glenn Becks targets Frances Fox Piven (of "Cloward-Piven"); "targets" fitting word

[BrainGlutton]

Because she’s now getting death threats on his website.

Piven was unnerved but not surprised. These are not pretty e-mails, but they appear positively decorous compared with what has been written about her by commentators on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, where she’s been the target of a relentless campaign to demonize her—and worse. There, under cover of anonymous handles, scores of people have called for Piven’s murder, even volunteering to do the job with their own hands. “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back,” wrote superwrench4. “ONE SHOT…ONE KILL!” proclaimed Jst1425. “The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal… LEAD,” declared Patriot1952. Posts like these are interwoven with ripples of misogyny, outbursts of bizarre anti-Semitism and crude insults about Piven’s looks (she’s actually a noted beauty) and age (she’s 78).

This fusillade was evidently set off by Piven’s recent Nation editorial calling for a mass movement of the unemployed [“Mobilizing the Jobless,” January 10/17]. But Beck has had Piven in his cross-hairs for some time. In the past few years he’s featured Piven, along with her late husband, Richard Cloward, in at least twenty-eight broadcasts, all of which paint them as masterminds of an overarching left-wing plot called “the Cloward-Piven strategy,” which supposedly engineered the financial crisis of 2008, healthcare reform, Obama’s election and massive voter fraud, among other world-historical events (see Richard Kim, “The Mad Tea Party,” April 12, 2010). Cloward and Piven, Beck once argued, are “fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system.” In his most recent diatribe against Piven (January 17) he repeatedly called her “the enemy of the Constitution.” In Beck’s telling, because Piven and her comrades on the left support civil disobedience in some circumstances, it is they—not the heavily armed militias of the radical right—who threaten Americans’ safety.

<snip>

. . . But while commentators debate whether the killer in that case—the mentally disturbed Jared Loughner—was inspired by the ravings of right-wing demagogues, the forgotten story of Byron Williams provides a straightforward example of the way hateful rhetoric fuels violence.

In July, Williams, a convicted bank robber, put on a suit of body armor and got in a car with a 9-mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308 caliber rifle equipped with armor-piercing bullets and set off for San Francisco. His destination was the Tides Foundation, which had been mentioned at that point in at least twenty-nine episodes of the Glenn Beck show, sometimes along with Piven. His goal, as he later told police, was to kill “people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU” in order to “start a revolution.” Williams’s mother said that he had been watching TV news and was upset at “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing-agenda items.” Or, as Williams himself put it, “I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for driving erratically and, after a firefight, subdued and arrested him before he could blow anyone else’s mind away.

For a responsible journalist and a responsible media outlet, such an incident would have spurred a process of intense self-scrutiny. But this is Glenn Beck and Fox, and as is evident from the campaign against Piven, nothing of the sort occurred. In the hundreds of posts about Piven on The Blaze, there is not one admonition to tone down the violent rhetoric, not one clear instance in which an editor intervened to moderate the thread. In fact, commenters seem at liberty to egg one another on: one poster pointedly noted that Piven lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY; another then linked to a website that listed Piven’s home address and phone number. “Why is this woman still alive?” asked capnjack. “Mainly because you haven’t killed her, I imagine. See, someone that really cares and has the courage of their conviction must actually DO SOMETHING,” responded Diamondback. And the calls for assassination are not limited to Piven. As Civilunrestnow put it in a post that perfectly captures the tenor of right-wing eliminationist fantasy, “I say bring it. 90 million legal gun owners with over 220 million legal firearms, MOST in the hands of people who claim to be center RIGHT. I think it’s time to reduce the surplus population of leeches, lay abouts, left wing nut jobs, the main stream media, liberal politicians and MOST defense attorneys.”

I can’t actually wish death on anyone on this board, even Beck, even in the Pit. I say only that somebody, somewhere, should DO SOMETHING.

[Baboonanza]

@BrainGlutton

Because she’s now getting death threats on his website.

I can’t actually wish death on anyone on this board, even Beck, even in the Pit. I say only that somebody, somewhere, should DO SOMETHING.

I’ll just get my vest and handgun. Meet you at the car in 5!

[What_the]

Way too many words up there.

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

Sorry about the question marks.

[Harborwolf]

I’m just glad that the rhetoric has finally calmed down. The important thing is that we don’t use gun metaphors any more. It’s still perfectly fine to declare people to be EVIL CONSPIRATORIAL MASTERMINDS WHO HAVE NEARLY BROUGHT CIVILIZATION TO IT’S KNEES BEFORE AND WILL NOT REST UNTIL THEY HAVE COMPLETE DOMINATION OVER THE ENTIRE GLOBE AND ALSO MADE EVERYONE GET GAY MARRIED AND HAVE UNIVERSAL BUT JOB KILLING HEALTH CARE!!! Just don’t use any more of that gun talk. People don’t like that as much any more.

I’m glad to see that we’ve all learned our lesson.

[Gyrate]

@What_the

Way too many words up there.

Sorry. I’ll summarize in words of two syllables or fewer.

“Glenn Beck spent many many shows claiming that these people are evil left-wing monsters who did many bad things. Many of the readers of Beck’s website have said that those people should be killed. Killed a lot. Killed now. And they use Beck’s words to support this view.”

Still too many words? How about “Beck say her much bad. Beck friends say 'kill now.”?

Nice try on the false equivalence thing though. Given that even that blatantly partisan website suggests that the worst thing the protesters did was walk on the guy’s lawn, I’m not seeing a parallel with directly inspiring at least one person to arm themselves to go commit mass murder, and then continuing to use the same rhetoric with regard to other people.

[SenorBeef]

In before right wing apologists!

I wonder if we’ll have the “well, the guy got stopped before he killed anyone, therefore crazy calls to violence are ok” angle or the “hey, no one takes anyone seriously when they spend their days telling other people how specific people are traitors trying to destroy everything they love via prominent media outlets” angle. Or maybe the “the guy is clearly a leftist!” angle!

[jjimm]

@What_the

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

So weak, it’s not even a logical fallacy - unless Piven commissioned that graphic.

[BrainGlutton]

@What_the

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

I think, as should you, that when you get to “a mob of SEIU astro-turfing thugs” there’s really no point in reading any further.

[joebuck20]

@What_the

Way too many words up there.

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

Sorry about the question marks.

Oh, fuck me, not this Tu Quoque horseshit again of “Hey, here are a few isolated examples of fringe loonies on your side acting like assholes, so that makes you just evil.”

[BrainGlutton]

Frances Fox Piven interviewed about the Beck campaign against her.

AMY GOODMAN: This has been going on for, what? More than a year now, this targeting.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Well, a couple of years, but I think it started before I was aware of it. I don’t actually listen to Glenn Beck. And I only became aware of it when I was interviewed by a couple of people pretending to be students and working on a term paper. I let them come to my home, and they interviewed me.

AMY GOODMAN: Who did they say they were?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Students at Western State Michigan University. They said they had been assigned Challenging Authority, and that to do their term paper, they wanted to do a video, which, you know, I’m sort of used to. Students are always looking for ways to do a term paper without reading anything. So, I had been in an automobile accident, so I asked them to come to my home, if they wanted to. I said they could have an hour. And a couple of days later, the clips from the interview were up on the Andy Breitbart blog, a right-wing blog. So then a friend of mine googled this person, the lead person, and he was a right-wing operative in Michigan running a little organization devoted to attacking the teachers’ union in Michigan.

AMY GOODMAN: Who had been in your home.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Pardon me?

AMY GOODMAN: Who had been in your home.

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Yes. And after that, I got maybe five or six requests by students for interviews, students I didn’t know. And then I googled each one, and they were none of them students. So it was just an idea that was going around in right-wing networks. And then, all of a sudden, I became aware of both the Glenn Beck shows and the other right-wing blogs and all the postings that were coming in from people who—you know, confused, angry, whatever, and thought that I was the source of all the problems that had overtaken the United States in the last 30 or 40 years.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Frances, this is really amazing, because here you have been involved in writing and analyzing the American society now for more than 40 years, and you’ve never gotten as much attention on television as suddenly you’ve gotten in the last few years by Glenn Beck. And do you have any sense of what triggered this sudden decision of him, who actually, being only been 46 years old, was just a baby when you and Richard Cloward first began writing about the welfare rights movement?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: That’s true.

JUAN GONZALEZ: What would trigger him to suddenly zero in on you?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Well, I think that there’s a certain amount of just accident that he picked me or picked Richard and me, partly accident, partly not so accidental, because there were at the time, in the late 1960s, early 1970s, there were a number of people who had moved from being on the left, further to the left than me, who were moving to the right, where the pay is better. And in making that move, they sort of took with them their familiarity with the work that we had done and then exaggerated, demonized it. You know, I think that—

JUAN GONZALEZ: And who were some of those people?

FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Well, it includes David Horowitz, Fred Siegel, Jim Sleeper, Ron Radosh, who recently headlined his blog “The Second Time is Farce: Piven Calls for Violent and Bloody Revolution.” That was just a few days ago, because I had written a little article in The Nation talking about the problems in organizing the unemployed, so the unemployed can have an impact, a voice, in American politics. But most of the article was about how hard it is to do.

[BrainGlutton]

@joebuck20

Oh, fuck me, not this Tu Quoque horseshit again of “Hey, here are a few isolated examples of fringe loonies on your side acting like assholes, so that makes you just evil.”

Even if you take the story at face value, they are not acting like loonies or even assholes, or if they are then America needs a lot more of this kind of assholery.

Say, does anyone know where the Koch Brothers live? Or Richard Mellon Scaife? Or Roger Ailes?

It’s still a more civilized response than anything analogous we see on the RW side. Like what’s described in the OP link.

[DianaG]

@What_the

Way too many words up there.

Words can teach us things. Reading is fundamental and all. And honestly, it’s not like you’re doing anything more important, dear.

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

No, it doesn’t, and they shouldn’t do that. Now what?

[What_the]

@joebuck20

Oh, fuck me, not this Tu Quoque horseshit again of “Hey, here are a few isolated examples of fringe loonies on your side acting like assholes, so that makes you just evil.”

Hey Joe … tuck your quoque back in your pants and calm down. This is the pit, right? I can say anything I want and use as many question marks as I want, can’t I?

[What_the]

@BrainGlutton

I think, as should you, that when you get to “a mob of SEIU astro-turfing thugs” there’s really no point in reading any further.

Kind of like the Washington Post… Washington Post mind you… story about the “radical” “band” of Republicans proposing to “slash” the budget that I saw yesterday.

I can’t find it now… could they have taken it down and cleaned up the language a little?

[Gyrate]

@What_the

Hey Joe … tuck your quoque back in your pants and calm down. This is the pit, right? I can say anything I want and use as many question marks as I want, can’t I?

Yup. And the rest of us can call you on it.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@What_the

Way too many words up there.

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

Sorry about the question marks.

I think that is bad. What do you think about the actual fucking OP?

Sorry it is too many words for you.

[Robot_Arm]

@Gyrate

Nice try on the false equivalence thing though. Given that even that blatantly partisan website suggests that the worst thing the protesters did was walk on the guy’s lawn,…

Oh, won’t someone think of the seedlings!

[Larry_Borgia]

@What_the

Way too many words up there.

What do you think of that union targeting the Walmart developer’s house? I suppose the smiley face in the middle of the target makes it ok?

Sorry about the question marks.

I’m really glad you post here and I hope you don’t go away. It’s useful to have a reminder and an example of just how fucking stupid some people can be.

[saoirse]

@Robot_Arm

Oh, won’t someone think of the seedlings!

Hey, those were going to be valuable barter items, one day! (That’s a Glen Beck joke.)

What really bugs me about this guy is thaht whenever anyone says anything even mildly critical of him, he immediately wets his pants and announces that he’s going to be wearing body armor for a while. Which obviously wouldn’t stop the bullet in the head he wants me to catch.

[YogSothoth]

Someone should really do something about Glenn Beck. I’m not going to say what, but hopefully that person has a healthy respect for the 2nd Amendment…and all the other Amendments but especially the 2nd. And the thing that they do will hopefully make Beck unable to keep doing the things he does. Or moving.

Again, I’m not going to say WHAT should be done, only that it should be done soon, hopefully when he’s outsomewhere vulnerable…to nature, like rain, you know, out in the open. And alone, not near a hospital. Cause they’re so socialist