Hysteria About Glenn Beck
Last week the Huffington Post ran a typical partisan tu quoque attempting to turn the tables on Glenn Beck’s hysteria about conspiracy theorists and ACORN activists in the Obama administration. According to HuffPo’s Sam Stein, Beck himself “has hosted, and even occasionally praised, a renowned white supremacist, a devout southern secessionist, a defender of slavery, and a 9/11 skeptic.”
The logical problem here, of course, is that even these claims about Beck were true, they wouldn’t negate anything Beck said about the Obama administration — and conversely, if Beck’s guilt-by-association technique is illegitimate, it has to be equally illegitimate when it’s used against him. It won’t do to say Stein is simply showing that Beck can be hoisted on his own petard, since that begs all the substantial questions. Does Stein really think Beck is a neo-Confederate? Does he think that Van Jones was unfairly pilloried? There are many things that can be said against Beck, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a case considering him a white nationalist or a 9/11 truther. Stein doesn’t make a serious argument for either insinuation.
What Stein does do, in ineptly attacking Beck, is tar Tom Woods. After citing racially charged language from the latter-day League of the South, for example, Stein connects LOS to Woods, who had a brief involvement with the group in its earliest days, when he was an undergraduate. Stein then quotes a pro-secessionist remark from Woods’s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and a negative review of the book by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel to show that Woods “harbors radical, pro-Confederate views.” Well, Woods is only pro-Confederate to the extent that a.) he’s pro-secession in general, for Vermont as much as for the South, and b.) he has what Hummel calls a “conservative reverence … for the Old South,” which is hardly radical — the very same sentiment has been expressed eloquently by James Webb.
For the sake of making a bad argument against Glenn Beck, Stein makes no argument at all against Woods but just casually slimes him. This doesn’t tell us anything about Beck, still less about Van Jones and Patrick Gaspard (the administration lefties Beck pilloried), but it titillates HuffPo readers who want to believe in vast right-wing, Southern nationalist conspiracies. Not so different, in other words, from what you get on Fox News, mutatis mutandis.
Points to Hummel in the review linked above for name-checking with urgency Theory and History by Ludwig von Mises, which should easily land high up anyone’s Top-10, desert-island list of books issuing from the postwar libertarian orbit. Some years after attending the 1979 summer seminar in political economy Cato ran at Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, among whose attendees were the young Tyler Cowen and his schoolmate the future Fed governor Randy Kroszner, and David Boaz, I read through in our course packet a generous chunk photocopied from a book whose author and title were unlabeled, and finding myself dazzled by the profundity, erudition, precision and clarity of its philosophical-cum-scientific takedowns of prime Marxist and historicist dogmas. Then, in reading the phrase, in describing of consumers exercising sovereignty via “their buying and abstention from buying”, I was able to “out” the author as Mises himself, and quick dot-connecting revealed the veiled book I Cato had sampled for us as Theory and History. As with the Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock, in reading a book like that, you develop a holy and lifetime hunger to spend your time as much with the likes of Spinoza, Montaigne, Goethe, &c., as you can while still remembering to eat (think of all those incomparably exquisite Old World footnotes Mises tucked lightly here and there, like the macaroons the old professor mentioned by Jacques Barzun in his foreword to the Cogitations from Nock tucked among his heaped-up papers “because it was such a pleasure to come upon them unexpectedly.”
A sure sign of the arrival of Web-Point-Whatever: the fact that, if this post is any indication, Dan is getting more comments beneath the Facebook links to his posts than here at his AmCon home blog. But we antisocial-networking, frame-smashing Lahtites find compensation for sharing the night here with only the crickets for call-and-response in the fact that, unlike the Peanut Gallery over at Facebook, we corncob-sucking, cracker-barrel, porch-whittling commenters back here at Dan’s General Store and Village (Adam) Smithy’s are under no space restrictions whatever save for those enacted when we fall asleep at our monitors after drafting here our Britannica Jrs., before hitting Send with a somnambulent swipe of our slumbering paws.
Speaking of Tweetophone space restrictions, those like me disinclined to submit to such scrotal vising were heartened beyond measure to find this in The Onion:
New ‘Noveller’ Allows People To Post Novels They Write During Course Of Their Day
This is first a vintage example of the certain kind of leftist that engages in the precise tactics of McCarthyism and is apparently clueless about this fact, and second a reminder of how few people could care less, for better or worse, about either Tom Woods or Van Jones.
Good analysis. I guess the difference is that few read Stein. Beck has a huge audience and is praised by leaders on the right.
I think the take home would be, if you are thinking about running for office, reread your old high school term papers. If you wrote anything controversial, it will be used against you.
Steve
I guess if I were a left-wing marxist commie Beck would piss me off too.