Wingnuts

Beck Uses Actor to Incite Violence

Rather than personally inciting violence, Glenn Beck has resorted instead to hiring an actor to dress up like Thomas Paine and incite violence.

Listen carefully to the language in the following bit:

This passage in particular:

Your complacency will only aid and abet our national suicide. Remember, they wouldn’t dare bomb Pearl Harbor…but they did. They wouldn’t dare drive two planes in the World Trade Center…but they did. They wouldn’t dare pilot a plane through the most sophisticated air defenses in the world and crash into the Pentagon, but they did.

They wouldn’t dare pass the largest spending bill in history in open defiance of the will of the people, but they did.

Basically, the recovery bill is Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined. And what did America do after those attacks? We went to war. So don't be complacent! Beck (through his actor proxy) is telling his viewers that we have to fight a war against the people responsible for, you know, creating jobs. And by the end, Beck/Actor just comes right out and defines this as a battle:

It’s time to hoist this battle flag once again. Now is the right time to be a patriot. My name is Thomas Paine, I’m ready to take back America. Are you?

The 9/11 and Pearl Harbor material is pretty explicit in terms of action/reaction, but this last section flat out calls for battle. Now for the tens of thousands of "armed and dangerous" jingoistic, militaristic reactionaries out there, are we really so sure that they'll take this as a figurative battle -- or will they take it literally? Glenn Beck is clearly too chickenshit to deliver this sort of inflammatory language himself, so we probably shouldn't expect him to be a man and to own his words if someone does, in fact, take him seriously.