Now that it's embraced its inner right-wing populist by sponsoring all those 'Tea Parties,' Fox News is going straight for the moonshine by promoting "state sovereignty" advocates who, as we mentioned yesterday, are the "Patriot" movement activists who were promoting militias in the 1990s.
Glenn Beck featured an entire hour devoted to the subject yesterday, while Neil Cavuto warmed up the subject for him by featuring a segment on the subject as well. And both of them featured people who have been heavily involved in promoting "Patriot" belief systems for years.
The most striking, of course, was Beck's hourlong "The Civilest War" program, which early on featured Beck adapting Martin Niemoller's famous "First they came" poem -- about the Nazis and the Holocaust -- to our present-day circumstances:
I think this is the problem. First they came for the banks. I wasn't a banker, I didn't really care. I didn't stand up and say anything. Then they came for the AIG executives. Then they came for the car companies. Until it gets down to you. Most people don't see -- they are coming for you at some point! You're on the list! Everybody's on the list. You may not be rich -- as currently defined.
Because, of course, bailing out failing banks and insurance companies and auto manufacturers is just like rounding up minorities and hauling them away to death camps.
As if that weren't enough bats--t crazy paranoia, much of the rest of the hour was devoted to similarly crazy talk from his participants. A Republican Utah legislator rants about "liberties and freedoms being destroyed" and the "tyranny of the federal government." Another Republican legislator, this time from Texas, talks about how Obama and the Democrats are creating "a socialist state".
Beck also calls upon a right-wing historian named Kevin Gutzman, who even his fellow right-wingers dismiss as a neo-Confederate, obsessed with a misreading of early American history that is like so many other "constitutionalist" interpretations, based on an originalism that would destroy such innovations as the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage (not to mention nearly everything else). [More on that below.]
But everything comes into sharp focus when Beck calls on Gary Marbut -- who Beck describes as the originator of the Montana gun law that inspired all these other legislators. We listen to Marbut's wisdom and absorb his advice in this show; indeed, Beck wraps up by calling on Marbut to tell us "what we've learned."
Marbut, you see, has been a fixture on the far right in Montana for many years. He's never actually been elected to any office at all, though he has run numerous times, because Montanans are all too well aware just how radical a nutcase the guy is.
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