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Glenn Beck's Muse

I've complained about this previously, but here's yet another Glenn Beck endorsement of the British band Muse, whose lead singer believes 9-11 was an inside job. Considering Beck's recent obsession with finding hidden meaning in artwork  and his guilt-by-association campaign against Van Jones for (among many things) his 9-11 truther connections, it seems only fair to explore Glenn's promotion of Muse.

Now, before going any further, it must be said that Glenn Beck is largely beyond rational critique. He operates in a world where the President is simultaneously a fascist, a communist (or socialist... those two are the same, aren't they?), and a racist, where a rumor about "FEMA death camps" deserves serious attention, where the entirety of the President's agenda is designed to ensure reparations for slavery and where DDT is actually good for you. If you still have any doubts, perhaps these little clips will settle the issue.

However, despite this generalized detachment from reality, Beck scored a big victory early this month when he served as the driving force behind the resignation of Van Jones as Green Jobs "Czar" (a short time later, Beck also got an NEA functionary fired). It was the "truther" affiliations that sunk Jones, but Beck had been out ahead of the curve and got most of the credit. Suddenly, he was the resident dragon-slayer at Fox News, accomplishing something that Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity have only dreamed of. 

Behind it all, Beck claimed the problem was the people President Obama chose to associate himself with. In the case of Jones,  who Glenn would have you know is a "self-avowed communist", his presence in the administration was either  evidence of a terribly incompetent vetting process, or (more likely) a sinister attempt to promote a wacked-out lefty to a "major" job in the administration, where he could help radically transform America, outlawing Apple Pie and free enterprise. You know-- the communist infiltration that McCarthy was so good at detecting back in the day.

Anyway,  imagine how shocked-- shocked!-- I was to find Beck not only personally enjoys, but has been promoting a band whose main singer has endorsed, whole hog, the very conspiracy theory that Van Jones was tied to, believes that land is a commodity that belongs to all earthlings, and even has a song about how Americans may have deserved what they got on September 11th, 2001. None of these beliefs are particularly novel-- many people apparently held them before members of Muse did-- but it's kind of hard to imagine Beck is a proponent of eliminating individual property rights, in line with the purported (or, shall we say, "self-avowed"?) philosophy of Muse's frontman.

Now, I have no problem with Muse. I listen to their music from time to time. They're a band whose entire appeal has consistently been in generating music steeped in hysterical paranoia, with lyrics probably not meant to be taken literally. The problem is Beck's complete hypocrisy on these "association" issues paired with his total lack of knowledge about the people and products he's promoting. And so, we're told by Beck that Muse "get[s] it" and that their "lyrics [are] on target".  

Of course, the joke's on Beck and his teabagger minions heading to the stores to support the band's new album. Would learning about the band's politics, which are often present in Muse's lyrics, change the minds of Beck and his followers? Probably not. Would it stop teapartiers from supporting the band's work or claiming it as their "theme song"? Unlikely. After all, these folks are way too busy preparing for the coming marxist-Nazi dystopia. 

In the interim, I'll eagerly await Beck's endorsement of Immortal Technique.

Update 1: I should have added a link to this Salon piece about Beck's actual, literal muse, Cleon Skousen.

Update 2: Turns out Muse really, really doesn't want Glenn's attention:

Fringe Festival

I report on the 9-12 tea party for The Nation. Full story below:

The Right's Fringe Festival

by SEBASTIAN JONES

September 16, 2009

This Saturday, some 70,000 people marched through downtown Washington, DC. Organizers of the "Taxpayer March on DC" crowed on their website that "thousands of local organizers and grassroots Americans" took to the streets because they've had "enough of the out of control spending, the bailouts, the growth of big government and soaring deficits." Pretty straightforward, bread-and-butter economic conservatism, right?

So imagine my surprise when, having just arrived at the march, I saw a thin, tall, bearded fellow with a boonie cap jogging up Pennsylvania Avenue shouting "White Power!" A few people looked around awkwardly, not sure how to react, but mostly the crowd just moved along. Why wouldn't they, after all, when just a few paces down the road an elderly man was showing off his "McCarthy Was Right!" sign, or when numerous placards compared the president to various genocidal tyrants, or when the most common mass-produced poster (courtesy of an antiabortion group) demanded that we "Bury Obamacare with Kennedy"?

This was only a sampling of the hateful language on display at the rally, which was only tangentially about taxation. More accurately, the event was a FreedomWorks-organized, corporate-funded, Fox News-fueled celebration of every conservative political and cultural cause of the past fifty years. Milling around the crowd, it was impossible to miss the references to issues as disparate as blocking investigations of CIA torture, promoting assault weapons and God "judging" America for homosexuality. Confederate flags were flown, Obama was told to "go back to Kenya," and so forth and so on. The crowd itself was almost exclusively white--and its members had come to get their country back.