New Republic Editor Desperately Distances Himself From Glenn Beck Due to Agreeing on Frances Fox Piven
I am not now nor have I ever been Glenn Beck.
Please, please believe me!
I am NOT Glenn Beck!
Such was the tone of the unintentionally hilarious article in The New Republic by contributing editor John McWhorter. Apparently his "thought crime" in the eyes of Jim Sleeper writing in Talking Points Memo was agreeing with Glenn Beck on the social toxicity of Frances Fox Piven:
One of Beck's targets is Professor Frances Fox Piven, as today's New York Times reports. When Beck started in on Piven last year, the clever, sad writer John McWhorter joined in, as did the right-wing provocateur David Horowitz.
...In March The New Republic sounded one of these alarms about the curse supposedly cast on African-Americans by the Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward, who were said to have tried to bring down capitalism by flooding the welfare rolls in the 1960s.
The purveyor of this long-exhausted half-truth at TNR was McWhorter, a young black linguist-turned-conservative racial bargainer. He cast Piven and Cloward among the crackpots he'd love to erase from public memory: "Rarely in American history have people with such a destructive agenda [as Piven and Cloward] had such power over the lives of the innocent....., helping to ruin the lives of, for example, some of my relatives."
EEK! Sleeper called McWhorter a (GASP!) conservative which caused the New Republic contributing editor to go into an absurdly funny defensive mode by establishing his liberal bona fides as well as to let us know that he is NOT Glenn Beck:
Now: Of late, Glenn Beck, for reasons of his own, has mounted a crusade against Piven (Cloward is deceased) which has resulted in death threats against her as a Marxist threat to our nation. This chills and disgusts me. I have never advocated witch hunts of this kind against anyone whose views I disagree with, and have had no interest at all in painting even openly Marxist views like Piven’s as inherently “unAmerican.” I entirely respect Piven’s right to express her views.
What chills and disgusts me even more, however, is Jim Sleeper’s claim that in criticizing Piven and Cloward I was taking a page from Beck. Sleeper has made a blithe, messy assumption on the basis of chronology: Beck started in on Piven a year ago this month, and my blurb in these pages on her and Cloward – in fact one of ten blurbs about assorted people, not a concentrated hit on Piven and Cloward alone – appeared in March. Sleeper has it that I “joined in” with Beck, then.
What Beck did to cause alleged threats against Piven, McWhorter doesn't say but Mediaite sheds some light on the matter:
...she tells the Times she is receiving death threats, and that Beck’s site, The Blaze, allegedly sports anonymous comments like “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back” (they are typically taken down within a short period of time). While Piven has said she has received email death threats, she has not produced them. Piven says she has taken security measures, but nothing that would interfere too much with her daily life.
And just in case Jim Sleeper or anyone else dare "tarnish" John McWhorter for being a conservative, he makes sure we know where he is coming from politically:
Sleeper’s sense of me is clearly based on not having engaged a word I have written since Losing the Race, given that he is obviously bright enough to process that someone who supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech would be rather infelicitously cast as a “conservative movement water-carrier.”
Okay, we got your point, John. You are NOT conservative and you are NOT Glenn Beck. However, please allow your humble correspondent to note the odd fact that you and Glenn Beck have never been seen together in the same room. Hmmm.....
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Comments
Now that just precious...
Submitted by TC Lynch on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 12:07pm.
SRSLY, I thought that Sleeper fella had croaked when his syndicated column disappeared, but the idea that he's been relegated to blogging for TPM is too funny by half!
Gee, that police state stuff
Submitted by eaglewingz08 on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 12:16pm.
Gee, that police state stuff is AOK if a marxist is protecting his/her own arse, but reprehensible if anyone else tries to do the same. Isn't it funny how it is always the commies and libtards who rail agains the police and security functions, who always go running to the police when someone gives them a dirty look?
Why do the left refuse to "get it"???!!!
Submitted by c5then on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 12:33pm.
Admitting and even rejoicing in the fact that someone has the right to voice an opinion does not mean that anyone else is not alowed to disagree with it nor catagorize it as what it is. This is the fundamental foundation of free speech that the liberals refuse to acknowledge; that free speech means that no matter what your viewpoint is, there will be someone who disagrees with it.
Calling the views of Pivan (and Clower) marxist is simply catagorizing them and is not a direct attack on them in and of itself. To another marxist, this would be praise. Based on the principles and values that this country was founded on and that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independance and the Constitution, saying that they are "unAmerican" is also a description of those ideas and not a specific refutation or argument against them. However, as a way of helping to group like things together and draw distinctions between groupings (things that we teach our children to do at an early age to help in processing the world), it serves to help those who do not know of the specific ideas to decide if they are something to look into further or to ignore as not worth the trouble.
Anytime that any speech is singled out as somehow not worthy or in need of oppresing and eliminating is an attack on speech itself and is the antithesis of free speech.
Madison and Jefferson and Franklin built a Republic - Roberts killed it!
Glenn Becks gets more death
Submitted by Jack Bauer on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 12:51pm.
Glenn Becks gets more death threats in day that Piven has received her entire worthless life as a Manicured Marxist --
A life spent cheerleading on the side for violent "street" confrontations to gin up some sort of proletariat "revolution."
Now she's all termbly. Cowardly old bag hasn't even got the courage of her own warped convictions on the efficacy of street violence.
At least it's good to hear of the left supporting a Fox.
All of the above Mr Obama? --- How about ALL OF THE BELOW, instead.
Why is it that Beck can't take on someone - MSM targeted Palin
Submitted by Gary Hall on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 1:12pm.
Just why is it that Glenn Beck can't take on certain ideologies or certain people with whom he strongly disagrees with, without being "targeted" by the MSM? He took on Piven. So what? Big deal. He took on Piven because he feels that Piven is a threat to our way of life. Well gee whiz, that is her goal.
With rare exception, our entire national mainstream media has taken-on, "targeted," Sarah Palin - and her children. Without doubt, their efforts have resulted in non-ending death threats against her. Does Palin threaten our way of life or rather, does she threaten the speed at which the left wishes to transform the United States into their vision of social/economic change?
It's unfortunate that bloggers would post threats on a web site and more unfortunate that some would make threats directly at Piven, especially when, in the two-way mirror of the MSM, the MSM continues to target Palin, and target conservative pundits and commentators, and target conservative lawmakers and target any and all political or social views which does not fall in line with the progressive left, and so the threats against them will continue. They will continue unreported by the MSM.
In today's Los Angeles Times, we are graced by another well placed spectacular "targeted" attack on Glenn Beck over the Piven issue, in an op-ed by Barbara Ehrenreich . Ehrenreich is bioed as "an American feminist, democratic socialist, sociologist and political activist, a prominent figure in the Democratic Socialists of America," in Wikipedia. In the LAT's, she only identified as haven recently written a book.
This is what Piven longs for, as she describes in an interview, embedded on Beck's Blaze site:
It would only take organized strikes (shut downs) from a small coalition of nations led for example by China to bring us to our knees.
Geeze - that would have riled up JFK.
Ehrenreich, in her column, A call to protest ignites a call to arms, only finds that Piven called on us to "organize a protest at the local unemployment office." That's it. And, from that once again the LAT's allows Ehrenreich to connect, once again, Glenn Beck to the shootings in Arizona:
When a congresswoman can be shot in a parking lot and a professor who falls short of Glenn Beck's standards of political correctness can be, however anonymously, targeted for execution, we have moved well beyond democracy -- to a tyranny of the heavily armed..
Glenn Beck is not calling for violence - Frances Fox Piven is.
(;~/ gary
Re: "Death Threat"
Submitted by Quasi-socialist on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 1:40pm.
"Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back"
As a death threat this is pretty piss-poor. "I'll give my life" not "I'll take yours and my freedom back". Apparently, he has 5000 rounds and nobody has died yet. So that he'll use them to "take ... freedom back" is a threat against Pivens hope for revolution. It's qualified.
So if they start a revolution, with their "angry identity" somebody might fire back, and that's considered a death threat????!!!???!!!????!!!!
Beck's site took that down--because Beck is sensitive to calls of violence, even qualified calls to violence.
This seems to be more aimed at warning Piven that an "angry identity" is going to counter more resistence then in her feeble academic scenario (5000 rounds more), then to say any of those rounds will be flying directly at her.
In bandying this "death threat" around, did the media just forget to quote the part about "I'm going to kill you and your children" or is this the money quote from that "threat"?
Yet despite that Beck's took down a post that indicated a willingness to do violence, and Beck's plees to listeners to do no violence "Because you lose", he gets tagged with "mounting a crusade" rather than calling her out.
My Lord, the left is getting stupider by the day!!
→ Obama's Plan
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 1:45pm.
Obama's plan is working very well. (I hope he fails)
The one group most capable of carrying his plan of collapse, the youth, is already growing and out of work. Congratulations to Obama for cajoling his Car company to send even more jobs across the border where they cannot be accomplished by Americans.
Marco, Chris, we can't wait until 2016. The time is now! One of you needs to take a step forward.
McWhorter is unhappy that people mischaracterized his position
Submitted by ekslib on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 4:36pm.
on Piven and he wants to set the record straight.
You'd think McWhorter would be smart enough to make a small effort to learn what Beck has really said about Piven.
His brain tells him one
Submitted by Thoreau on Wed, 01/26/2011 - 9:16pm.
His brain tells him one thing, but his guts tell him he's a coward. Quite a man.