New Orleans It’s amazing how we become inured to the ridiculous, even when it is abusive and preposterous. That’s my cut on Glenn Beck and his ranting, especially when he evokes me as anti-christ and revolutionary. Over the last couple of years, whenever I would mention the absurdity of it all, too often it would end up on Beck’s show on another whiteboard of whackiness, so I followed Huey Long’s old dictum that there is no real defense for a public attack and let it all run off of me like water off a duck’s back.
When I flew into San Francisco a couple of months I got there just as a crazy was in the news having been arrested in a fire fight with the cops as he was headed to do damage to the Tides Foundation, ACLU and others. He’s now conceded he was revved up by Beck and the Fox News fanatics. I didn’t enjoy seeing my name in those articles either, but what can you do, move under a rock? Nada, me! Not because I’m such a cowboy anymore (I swear!), but the work has to be done, and it’s the risk we’ve always lived with….
Well, my friend, Drummond Pike, Tides Founder and CEO, has had enough of this shit and though generally much, much more mellow than me, has reared back and lofted spit right in the eye of not Beck, the puppet, but Rupert Murdoch, the grand master of Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and more. Drummond wrote an excellent letter that’s getting good reviews asking Fox to stop the hate speech before someone else is hurt or killed, and going one better and demanding that Fox advertisers back away from this insanity before it’s too late. Working with Media Matters and others who are veterans of the Beck advertisers’ wars, he’s clear that the collective underpinning of Fox advertising is subsidizing the Beck harangues, because advertisers have abandoned him like a toxic spill.
Drummond is giving them 30 days to back off. Or else!
Enough is enough. Drummond is right, and I’m wrong. We probably shouldn’t ignore this craziness, but instead should push back until we hurt Beck and Murdoch where it hurts them: in the pocket book.
Take it from me, Brother Glenn, that’s revolutionary capitalism!
Update: You can read Drummond Pike’s letter to Fox News’ advertisers here: http://blog.tides.org/2010/10/15/dear-fox-advertiser/