Here's a long interview with RFK Jr. and someone I hadn't thought about in a long time — Glenn Beck.

"Senators, America we need to exercise our common sense about what happened.... Let's not get caught up in a lot of outlandish lawyers theories here. Exercise your common sense about what just took place in our country."

Said Lead Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin, quoted in a February 11th Wall Street Journal piece — "In Closing, Raskin Quotes Thomas Paine: 'Tyranny, Like Hell, Is Not Easily Conquered'" — by Lindsay Wise. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet was called "Common Sense."

Quoted in response to Raskin, Senator Josh Hawley: "I was really disappointed they didn’t engage much with the legal standards. This is a legal process after all. Very little engagement."

When do we get to bypass studying the factual details and legal standards and all the links in a chain of reasoning? When is it okay to just look at the whole thing and rely on instinct and just know that something is right or wrong? 

The answer can't be: When it helps my side win. 

People who liked Raskin's appeal to "common sense" — as opposed to "lawyers theories" — need to realize it's also the way Trump argued that he won the 2020 election. You just look at what you can see and feel what you feel. 

And that's how Trump has been talking to his people all along. In your heart, you know he's right... or, in your guts you know he's nuts. 

Bias has become the preferred form of reasoning. Better not get bogged down in lawyers theories. The other side is off and running. 

Here's an article in by Sophia Rosenfeld in The Nation from 2017, "The Only Thing More Dangerous Than Trump’s Appeal to Common Sense Is His Dismissal of It":

Trump began his quixotic campaign for president as the embodiment of a familiar kind of right-wing, common-sense populism. Instead of deference to well-trained scientists, academics, journalists, and even governmental authorities, he touted the true wisdom of “the people.” In place of fancy studies built on research, data, and modeling, he promised plain-spoken, off-the-cuff reports on the state of our world and obvious, practical solutions to our problems. 

That is, Trump suggested politics was actually quite simple if only one would rely on the kind of basic reasoning which emerges from just going about normal, everyday business using one’s senses and instincts and which—surprise, surprise—tends to run counter to “establishment” conclusions.... 

Michael Moore and Glenn Beck try, each in his way, to explain America's alienation from from the elite.

"Meet the Press" had a very interesting segment today with Chuck Todd talking to Michael Moore and then to Glenn Beck about the rebellion against the elite going on in America. The left-wing Moore and the right-wing Beck were saying very similar things about the way people are feeling now.

Moore said people are seeing Trump as "maybe their messenger": "Even though they don't necessarily like him or agree with him so much, I think that... they love the idea of blowing up the system.... [F]or some strange reason, see Donald Trump as their, as their means to get back at, at, at this system."

Beck — who said Moore had correctly "diagnosed the problem in the country" — drifted into a more spiritual realm:

Everybody feels like there's a play going on, and we're just watching it and looking at each other and shaking our heads in disbelief. And nobody's listening to the hardworking American who doesn't feel like they belong to anything anymore. In fact, it's almost as if we're being, we're standing outside and we're not being invited to this party at all....

I couldn't decide if Beck sounded more like a bland minister or a stoned college roommate. He turned to history, which, he said, he's been "looking through":

And the only thing I can come back to is Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What we're going through right now is more of a Malcolm X attitude, where we don't understand reconciliation, we just want to win. We have to stop winning.

We have to stop winning. Donald Trump, of course, is always saying "We don't win anymore." Beck, oddly, is saying it's wrong to want to win. We ought to stop winning! What this has to do with the American people turning against the elite, I don't really know.

And we have to start reconciling with each other. And, and realize, we're not going to lose our houses or our jobs or our country. We're losing something much more important. 

Now, I'm hearing echoes of the words of Jesus: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Beck continues up to and beyond the edge of coherence:

We're losing ourselves. We're losing our civility. We're losing our decency. We're, we're losing our neighbors and our family. How high of a price are we willing to pay before we say the idea that Martin-- that, that Malcolm X had, which was, "Get 'em" is not the path that we should go on? We have to start reconciling with each other. And unfortunately, right now, there's no leader to do that nationally. It's going to require each of us, in our own communities to stand and, and, and be shamed, and be, and be pilloried for it but actually stand and do it.

Be shamed? What is Beck asking people to do?

The incoherent notion that the GOP convention must pick Trump or Cruz.

On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd interviewed Glenn Beck. Beck, a Cruz supporter, was there to argue that if there's an open convention, the delegates should be limited to choosing between Trump and Cruz (and should pick Cruz). Todd does enough to show Beck's incoherence but doesn't really nail him down:

CHUCK TODD: Let me start with this concern. We've heard it from many people that are Cruz supporters and that Trump supporters over the airwaves, who are concerned that somehow the party establishment may deny both of them. What would happen do you think to, what would your listeners, how would they react?

GLENN BECK: I think it would be the end of the G.O.P. ...

CHUCK TODD: So you think if Paul Ryan is somehow plucked as the Republican nominee, that it would be the end of the G.O.P. --

GLENN BECK: -- I think it would be very bad. You can't disenfranchise people. We've all gone out. We've been passionate about it. We've all been going back and forth and voted on the people that we believe. I really think it has to be one of the two frontrunners. I just think people would feel very betrayed....

I know he wants Cruz, but he's mischaracterizing what the people are doing. We were enfranchised when we voted in a primary and our vote was given the effect that we were told it would have toward selecting delegates who would vote on our behalf at a convention. And let's be clear about where the passion is and is not. Many of us in Wisconsin who voted for Cruz were voting to stop Trump and to get to an open convention where we hope to see Paul Ryan selected. Don't imagine some passion on our part that augments that passion of yours. If the GOP convention picks Paul Ryan, I wouldn't feel betrayed. I'd feel vindicated.

Most-liked comment at the WaPo article "Glenn Beck’s dramatic revelation: He’s been hiding a mysterious brain illness."

"As a physician, this is all medical gibberish which possibly explains his commentary and views. He needs a psychiatrist more than all the unspecified treatments and experimental therapies mentioned. He displays features of psychosis."

Second-most-liked: "'Glenn Beck reveals he's been hiding a mysterious brain illness.' He didn't do a very good job of hiding it."

Third: "Beck suffers from CFD, or cranial fecal disorder...."

What Glenn Beck might do with a butter knife.

I had to look up Nicholas Sparks. Which movies are Nicholas Sparks movies? Looking at that list of movies — none of which I've seen — I'm reminded of the horribleness of movies. I guess I have some empathy — me, being a woman — for males who endure this kind of stuff, presumably to please their woman, as Glenn Beck has 2 or 3 times. And maybe his wife finds this kind of after-the-show riffing hilarious or is at least comfortable...



... or not. Who am I to say?

Elsewhere on the web, winkies are calling this "transphobic."

Camille Paglia says the Duck Dynasty debate really is about freedom of speech.

She said:

"I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so... And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I 100 percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?

"I mean really, besides my grandparents, who are both dead, who is watching the nightly news?"

Said Glenn Beck, when challenged about his boast that The Blaze would put traditional news out of business.

I've given some thought over the years — it's one of my long-time thought experiments — to the idea of an afterlife that consisted only of being able to watch the TV news, showing what was going on back in the world of the living.

***

And here's an article about Glenn Beck's "Man in the Moon" show:

Part Tea Party rally, part Cirque du Soleil (my characterization, which Beck objected to), the show is a window into Beck’s mind — which he admits is riddled with attention-deficit disorder and a busy, buzzing energy — that is possibly more revealing than his famous chalkboard rants.

Strange!

Conservatives usually like to present themselves as appealing to the rational mind. This is not that.

Daniel Ellsberg and Glenn Beck are on the same page.

I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited.Earmarks of a real hero. guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun…
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) June 9, 2013

I was just with Dan Ellsberg as he learned out about Edward Snowden. He called Snowden a hero, said he's been waiting for him for 40 years.
— Trevor Timm (@trevortimm) June 9, 2013

(Via the up-and-running Wikipedia page for Edward Snowden.)

AND: Sounds so millennialist: He is the one we've been waiting for. Just what was said about Barack Obama. There's quick turnover in messiahs these days.

"As corporate rather than government actors, the Deciders aren’t formally bound by the First Amendment."

"But to protect the best qualities of the Internet, they need to summon the First Amendment principle that the only speech that can be banned is that which threatens to provoke imminent violence, an ideal articulated by Justice Louis Brandeis in 1927. It’s time, in other words, for some American free-speech imperialism if the Web is to remain open and free in twenty-first century."

This is a big subject for me, something I've argued with Bob Wright about, notably in this March 2011 post: "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

ADDED: Here's a clip from March 2011:

"Glenn Beck on the CNN 'Pit of Despair' and Why He Got Out of Cable TV."

Headline at Forbes, with the amusing correction:

An earlier version of this post quoted Beck saying the “Pit of Despair” was at Fox News. In fact, he was talking about his time at CNN when he made that remark. I’ve corrected both the article and the headline to reflect that.

Ha ha ha. Would that have been the headline if the mistake hadn't been made?

Before coming to Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. “I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, ‘I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,’” he said.*

Among his frustrations at both networks, he said, was the rigid, formulaic thinking about how to produce a talk show. “Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz” in the 1950s, he said. “There’s no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what’s called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor.”

For Beck, who loves to amble around as he talks, it was an unwanted constraint. “I moved, and they couldn’t follow me,” he said. “I said to them, ‘Get me a sports director, please. Get someone with experience producing sports. Just tell them I’m carrying a ball. I think they can do it.’ But everybody in news was saying, ‘You’re supposed to stay here.’”

Even as Lucy wanted to get into show business, Glenn Beck wants to roam free.

EBay thwarts Glenn Beck's satirical artwork.

"Obama in Pee Pee" violated a viewpoint-neutral policy:

Your listing contain [sic] the bodily fluid of urine. We do not allow bodily fluids to be listed on our site. Even if the liquid in the jar is not urine, you are describing it as such. We do not allow this type of listing and we ask that you do not relist this in any way....

Too bad Beck didn't do a more accurate satire of Andres Serrano's notorious "Piss Christ," which was a photograph. EBay's policy wouldn't have covered a photograph of urine (or of liquid described as urine).

"Does Mitt Romney’s Mormonism make him too scary or weird to be elected to president of the United States?"

Asks Glenn Beck, a Mormon, speaking to Evangelical Christians, reported in the NYT.

During his special program, Mr. Beck took questions from mostly evangelical Christian listeners, colorfully debunking misperceptions about Mormonism. The “magic underwear” was compared to a skullcap, and Mr. Beck insisted that polygamy was seen as a “perversion” in the modern church.

“It’s not weird to be a Mormon,” he assured his listeners at the end of the program, “and it’s not weird to be president if you’re Mormon.”

It's fascinating — isn't it? — how little anti-Mormon material has been spread about in this election. The only notable person who seems to be going there is Andrew Sullivan:

Andrew Sullivan recently posted YouTube footage of LDS temple ceremonies in an effort to turn Romney’s Mormonism into an argument against his candidacy.

The video posted by Sullivan was shot surreptitiously inside LDS temples by a former Mormon who wanted to use the publicity connected with the Romney campaign to embarrass the LDS community. (The video creator enhanced the footage with his own monologue — wearing a gorilla mask — and spooky "Carmina Burana" soundtrack.)...

I think most Americans have a deep sensibility respecting religion and don't care to look into details about any given sect that could be exploited to make outsiders see it as bizarre. Sullivan, like Joe Biden, is a Catholic. You could make an equivalent YouTube video holding Catholics up to derision and contempt. That's generally not how we behave in America. I wonder who is more susceptible to this anti-Mormon material: the middle Americans who are aggregated under the "Evangelical Christians" label, who listen to Glenn Beck, or the affluent, educated coastal Americans who read Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times? Whichever, the notable fact is that there has been very little effort to stimulate anti-Mormon sentiment, and that's an excellent thing about America.

"I went to the bar and I ordered a Jack and coke and I turned around and locked eyes with Tania..."

"... and before I took the drink I set it down and I walked over and I asked her if she wanted to go and have a cup of coffee with me - and we haven't been apart since."

Don't you already know whether you want to believe the stories Glenn Beck tells?

Media Matters makes a montage of the Glenn Beck show.

Media Matters hates Glenn Beck, but this montage is pretty damned entertaining, perhaps because the Fox News channel show is ending. Tonight is the last installment:

An advertising boycott that began after Beck said Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people” led to more than 400 advertisers telling Fox they didn’t want their commercials seen on his show.

Fox and Beck headed for a divorce, their relationship largely soured by control issues. Beck has set up his own diversified business, as he makes speeches, writes books and owns a website along with GBTV, which is run by a former Fox executive.

That Media Matters montage made me...
	... think about why I love Glenn Beck.
	... wish I'd paid more attention to what might have been a great show.
	... think about why I hate Glenn Beck.
	... realize that man needed to be exiled to the internet.
pollcode.com free polls

Glenn Beck will "transition off" Fox News.

Announced just now.

The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News.

Back on February 2, I wrote “When did the left turn against free speech?” and used some clips from a Bloggingheads I did with Bob Wright, in which I talked about free speech values and rejected Bob's attempt to restrict the idea of free speech to the constitutional right to free speech, which only deals with the problem of government restrictions on speech.

The text of my post, however, doesn't restate our disagreement about the meaning of the term, and Bob emailed me to complain. And then last Friday, I did another Bloggingheads, and Bob brought up his beef about the definition of the term again. So I invited him to give me permission to publish the whole email exchange, and he agreed, so here goes...

In the blog post, explaining Bob Wright's position, I said that he thought that "free speech is too dangerous because it might be false and it might inspire bad people to act out in terrible ways." Since Bob's point was that Roger Ailes should kick Glenn Beck off the air, Bob said:

"But what about Beck? Are his comments about Piven fairly characterized as having crossed some line into dangerous irresponsibility?"

Asks Peter Wood in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

What Beck does on the air is certainly not scholarship. He isn’t drawing careful distinctions, seeking nuance, or searching for contextual understanding. He is, rather, engaged in polemic. This is, however, a form that requires some mastery of the facts and considerable ability to frame a persuasive argument. He or his assistants have done their research. I doubt that he has factually misrepresented Piven’s statements. He has, however, offered a strong interpretation of what those mean, and his conclusion is that she is a deep source of intellectual mischief in American life.

Those who are culturally or politically more or less on Piven’s side resent this picture of themselves, and some have responded hyperbolically....

The left explodes in anger if you suggest it is the more rageful of the two [sides]. The right tends to laugh at the idea....

Higher education has no special immunity from the angri-culture. On the contrary, it is a privileged haunt for those who delight in scorn, derision, and wrathful dislike of mainstream American culture...

To claim academic freedom as a protection of one’s own diatribes while crying “no fair” when someone aims a diatribe back at you requires a clownish degree of self-regard.

Yes, and let's also question the assumption that what goes on in academia is certainly scholarship (and not polemic). Drawing careful distinctions, seeking nuance, or searching for contextual understanding...

Glenn Beck reacts to what they're saying about him.

Watch him watch Michelle Goldberg:



Michelle Goldberg is a lefty columnist I've done Bloggingheads diavlogs with.

Glenn Beck... I don't know what to make of him. I can't listen to him long enough to follow his theories. Seriously, those banks of creepily lit brown blackboards covered in orange chalkings... it's nightmarish. It flips my too-crazy-to-watch switch, which keeps me from ingesting the substance. But I don't turn around and call him crazy. I'd monitor him for you, but I don't have the attention. I'm suddenly like a schoolboy the teacher thinks needs Ritalin, and I just say no.

When did the left turn against free speech?

One of the commenters declares that my "assertion that 'the best test of the truth is its ability to get accepted in the marketplace of ideas' was probably the most offensive part of her argument." When questioned about whether I really said that, he comes back with:

She cited a Justice whose name I haven't retained, as in: "As Justice X says, ..." followed by the verbatim passage I quoted.

She cited a Justice whose name I haven't retained.... Oh, for the love of God, why doesn't every educated person in America know the name of the Supreme Court Justice who said that... or at the very least know that it's embarrassing not to know? As if I'd thrown out some abstruse legalistic peculiarity!

And that was part of an argument by the commenter — echoing Bob Wright — that free speech is too dangerous because it might be false and it might inspire bad people to act out in terrible ways.

Remember when lefties were all about free speech? When did that change? Why did that change? Perhaps the answer is: Free speech was only ever a means to an end. When they got their free speech, made their arguments, and failed to win over the American people, and when in fact the speech from their opponents seemed too successful, they switched to the repression of speech, because the end was never freedom.