A VISION OF FOREIGN POLICY THAT ONLY BECK CAN PROVIDE…. Over the last year or so, Fox News’ Glenn Beck has lost about a third of his audience, which is a pretty significant drop, and may very well lead the deranged media personality to think of ways to bring viewers back.
One way, for example, may be for Beck to be even more creative when sharing crazy visions of global affairs. Yesterday, the strange man did his best to explain events in Egypt with a take that really has to be seen to be believed. Chris Hayes called it “a tour de force of paranoid ignorance,” which sums it up nicely.
It’s a little tough to excerpt, but Media Matters flagged this gem, which helped capture Beck’s vision: “I believe that I can make a case in the end that there are three powers that you will see really emerge. One, a Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe. Two, China, that will control Asia, the southern half of Africa, part of the Middle East, Australia, maybe New Zealand, and God only knows what else. And Russia, which will control all of the old former Soviet Union bloc, plus maybe the Netherlands. I’m not really sure. But their strong arm is coming. That leaves us and South America. What happens to us?”
The poor folks who watch Beck and actually listen to him received quite an education yesterday. China will seize New Zealand; Turkey is a dictatorship; Hamas will take over Saudi Arabia; and there’s some kind of connection linking uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt with debt crises in Greece.
All of this, of course, is the fault of “Marxist communists” — as opposed to, say, Marxists and communists — Muslims, and progressives. Indeed, Beck insisted that the events only he can see are “coordinated.”
I’m still torn on whether Beck actually believes his own insanity, but his viewers are nevertheless being instructed to begin “storing food” because we’re witnessing the “coming insurrection.”
Adam Serwer’s take on this rang true: “I tend to think this would be more frightening if it were comprehensible, but it’s a symptom of a basic problem which is that several basic heuristics conservatives use for slotting things into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories are clashing with each other. So democracy is supposed to be good, but Muslims are bad, liberals are bad, and if Muslims are bad and liberals are bad, then the protests must be some kind of combined Marxist-Islamist conspiracy that will lead to Islamists and Marxists splitting the globe between each other.”
