Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Is Glenn Beck Using Subliminal Rascism To Push His Agenda?



I was watching Glenn Beck yesterday and found that even though he does not make any references to the "racist" remarks, he is doing a good job trying to activate our neural networks that link Obama to racism.  I understand that by me writing this, I must be one of George Soros' "blogging minions".

Yesterday, he showed a speech given by Van Jones at the Power Shift '09 conference, discussing environmentalism.  Here is the full transcript of what Glenn Beck had played from that conference:
If all we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system, and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system. When we don't deal with how we are consuming water. We don't deal with how we're treating our other sister and brother species. We don't deal with toxins. We don't deal with the way we treat each other. If that's not a part of this movement, let me tell you what you'll have: You'll have solar-powered bulldozers, solar-powered buzz saws, and biofuel bombers, and we'll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines and we'll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! We're gonna change the whole system! We're gonna change the whole thing!
Glenn Beck had originally played the end of the segment, where Van Jones enthusiastically said "We're gonna change the whole system".  Beck had focused on this stating that it was more than about solar panels, but about accomplishing these goals cannot only be about new forms of energy. but out of fear of being taken out of context Beck had decided to show his viewers the beginning of the video.  From that segment, Glenn Beck has determined that Van Jones was really talking about "social justice", but it was disguised in a speech about environmentalism, because you can't just come out and say you are going to fundamentally change America into a Communist nation, can you?  According to Beck, you can.  Five days prior to the election last year, Obama gave a speech in which he said "we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."  I guess nobody listened to Obama's speech.  There is no possibility that he was discussing being elected to office after eight controversial years of President Bush, that saw two wars and an economic crisis.

Taking a ride on the Glenn Beck train, we move from our first stop with Van Jones, where he says "we're gonna change the whole system" to our second stop, with Obama mentioned "fundamentally transforming the United States of America".  Beck goes on to say that if the vision our founding fathers had for this nation is not working, "and communism, Marxism or socialism is the right and relevant path, then let's have that discussion in America."  But if you look earlier into the program, Beck said he doesn't even want a communist to have lunch with the President, and that he was even uncomfortable with Obama meeting with Putin (you cannot get these transcripts off of Fox News bcause they seemed to edit the brief transcript, but I am sure you can YouTube it.

Play the second clip of Van Jones:
And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what? Renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! Give them the dignity. Give them the respect that they deserve. No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt.
Beck asks "Give them the wealth?"  Before he could go on and discuss Van Jone's subversive tactics, he moves on to the next logical step, Reverend Wright.  Reverend Wright?  That's correct.  Apparently, this sounded all to familiar to Glenn Beck, and he dug up a clip with Reverend Wright where he preaches the following:
We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else too. 

And before you know it, Glenn Beck has another clip, but this time of Reverend Joseph Lowery, delivering the inaugural benediction for President Obama, where at the end of the speech, he says:
And in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.
Again, the transcript on Fox News excludes a lot.  Glenn Beck focused on the "when white will embrace what is right", stating that at the time, people dismissed it as rhetoric from the Civil Rights movement back in the 1960s, and he described Reverend wright as a "crazy uncle", but then swung back with Van Jones, asking what his excuse was.  Considering the what he said about the previous two, why mention them.  Why not focus on just Van Jones.  Beck is trying to establish a profile linking Obama to Jones, Wright, and Lowery, showing that Obama is a racist, but his since the boycott of his show by advertisers, it seems as if Beck is using a more subliminal method of pointing towards Obama's racism, by activating neural networks associated with these men, and notions of racism, as well as Beck's question regarding race, in which he asks his audience "Can you believe wealth should be taken from one group and given to another based on race?"  Glenn Beck then goes back to show more Van Jones:
What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who come here from all around the world who we're willing to have out in the field, with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights and we don't want to give them dignity and we don't want to give them respect?
Glenn Beck discusses that he has nothing against immigrants, just as long as they come through the "front door", which I presume he means legal.  Funny is that in the clip, Van Jones never claimed these immigrants to be illiegals.  He then goes on to play another clip of Van Jones, this time from when Jones was the executive director of the Ella Baker Center.  There he had said:
We're really entering a third wave of environmentalism in the United States.

The white polluters and the white environmentalists are essentially steering poison into the people of color communities.
Notice the gap between the first and second line?  That is not by mistake.  Glenn Beck had spliced the first sentence with the second.  Watching the video, the screen flashes after Van Jones speaks the first line, and then it cuts to a different view where he speaks the second.  I do not deny Jones ever said these words, but it is very suspicious for Glenn Beck to cut up the video.  What is the context of the interview?  Here is the sixteen minute video where the first line can be found :



The first line is taken from the first minute of the interview.  So when does the final line appear?  Shortly after, but the entire message of the interview is lost.  It is like reading the back of a book without reading the book.  While he does discuss race, he discusses the impact of ecological changes, and the possibilities of what he calls "eco-apartheid", where wealthy neighborhoods will have clean and green technologies, while poor neighborhoods will still have antiquated technologies associated with environmentalism, that would have a negative impact on health, and stopping the practice of giving money to polluting industries, and instead, give money to create green jobs, stopping the cycle in these lower class neighborhoods, making safe and healthy communities.  Watching and listening to the video, this hardly sounds like radical attacks against immigrants or whites.  As for the previous clip regarding immigrants, it sounds as if he is referring to the practice of crop dusting fields, regardless of if people, or in this case immigrants, are in them. 

The easiest way I could explain the intent of his message by using the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) as an example.  The CARS program was simple.  Offer money for people to trade in their less fuel efficient cars for newer, more fuel efficient cars.  In theory, by removing these so-called clunkers from the road, you would be creating a healthy environment, but you could also view the CARS program as disproportionately affecting the poor.  Those who were capable of trading in a car were probably not part of the lower class, and the cars they were to trade in were probably not as bad as a really poor person's car.  700,000 cars were traded in using the program, but the program did not remove the worst offending cars, and those cars are probably found in poorer communities, while wealthier communities will benefit from newer, healthier cars.  In my opinion, Van Jones should focus less on racial disparity and more on economic disparity.  Because of his past association with the Communist Party and comments he has made regarding race, conservatives are now linking communism and racism, or what they are now describing as "social justice", as also being a part of environmentalism, and it seems as if that will be added to the list of ideals to demonize.

Like a subliminal message, or more like previous Karl Rove tactics during the Bush administration, when he asks the question about race, even though it was referencing the Van Jones speech that mentioned Native Americans.  Our neural networks were already activated by Reverend Wright and Reverend Lowery, and so when the question is asked, we associate the taking of wealth from the whites and giving it to the blacks, not the Native Americans capitalizing from their land.  To better understand this, I would recommend the book The Political Brain by Drew Westen.

According to a summary from PublicAffairs Books,  the book addresses various topics regarding strategy, while discussing how the brain functions.
The Political Brain is a groundbreaking investigation into the role of emotion in determining the political life of the nation. For two decades Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, has explored a theory of the mind that differs substantially from the more "dispassionate" notions held by most cognitive psychologists, political scientists, and economists—and Democratic campaign strategists. The idea of the mind as a cool calculator that makes decisions by weighing the evidence bears no relation to how the brain actually works. When political candidates assume voters dispassionately make decisions based on "the issues," they lose. That's why only one Democrat has been re-elected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt—and only one Republican has failed in that quest.
In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins. Elections are decided in the marketplace of emotions, a marketplace filled with values, images, analogies, moral sentiments, and moving oratory, in which logic plays only a supporting role. Westen shows, through a whistle-stop journey through the evolution of the passionate brain and a bravura tour through fifty years of American presidential and national elections, why campaigns succeed and fail. The evidence is overwhelming that three things determine how people vote, in this order: their feelings toward the parties and their principles, their feelings toward the candidates, and, if they haven't decided by then, their feelings toward the candidates' policy positions.

Westen turns conventional political analyses on their head, suggesting that the question for Democratic politics isn't so much about moving to the right or the left but about moving the electorate. He shows how it can be done through examples of what candidates have said—or could have said—in debates, speeches, and ads. Westen's discoveries could utterly transform electoral arithmetic, showing how a different view of the mind and brain leads to a different way of talking with voters about issues that have tied the tongues of Democrats for much of forty years—such as abortion, guns, taxes, and race. You can't change the structure of the brain. But you can change the way you appeal to it. And here's how…
This is not a book to convert people to Democratic principles, but it shows how emotion can take over a logical argument.  I mention this book because Glenn Beck is a prime example of how this works.  His most recent show seems to be trying to scare whites that their wealth will be taken away from them, but he cannot come out and say that, but if he makes these various connections on his show, the brain can fill in the blanks, and will work towards Beck's goal in the future.  I believe that Beck's commentary is far more dangerous then he percieves Van Jones' threat to our Republic to be.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please share your thoughts and experiences in relation to this post. Remember to be respectful in your posting. Comments that that are deemed inappropriate will be deleted.