BREAKING NEWS: “Glenn Beck” Confesses His On-Air Persona Is Part Of Decade-Long Sociology Experiment.

Sociologist Peter Morton

Filed by Max Canning:

New York—In a stunning admission that is likely to send shockwaves throughout the American media, “Glenn Beck” announced on Sunday that his radio and television shows are part of an elaborate social experiment to find out whether he could “make the crazy seem plausible to millions of people.”

“This has been an incredibly disturbing experience for me,” said Peter Morton, a.k.a. “Glenn Beck.” On Sunday, Morton revealed in a press conference and Q&A with reporters that he is a sociology professor at the University of South Florida who has been on sabbatical for ten years, during which time he has hosted a nationally syndicated radio show and two cable television programs as part of a major academic research project. Morton said he has authored an upcoming book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid, which describes his experiences as one of the preeminent right-wing talk show hosts in the United States.

“I cannot continue the charade any longer,” a visibly shaken and broken Morton read from a prepared statement. “This has gotten way out of hand. I started this experiment ten years ago with honest intentions, to test the credulity of the American public, and to try to gain a deeper understanding of the political psychology of the American people. Today, my experiment ends, and my search for a therapist begins.”

Morton said his experiment commenced in 2000, when he used his connections in the radio industry to secure an afternoon show on WFLA in Tampa. “By that time,” said Morton, “I had already published several peer-reviewed papers on the sociology of politics, so I came up with an alias. Americans gravitate towards people with short names that are only one or two syllables long. Notice that Obama is the first president since JFK to have a last name that’s more than two syllables, and only the third major presidential candidate since 1972 with a three-syllable name, [McGovern, 1972 and Dukakis, 1988] so I eventually settled on ‘Glenn Beck.’”

When the Glenn Beck Program premiered in 2000, Morton espoused moderately conservative views. However, as time progressed, Morton said he realized that in order to maintain ratings that would keep him on the air, he would have to “up the ante.” Gradually, Morton went from a reasonable but obscure radio show host to a right-wing fringe figure broadcast over 280 stations nationwide by 2008.

“This endeavor was only supposed to last six months, a year, tops. I was planning on losing money because I was funding it myself,” said Morton. “The next thing I knew, I was making millions of dollars for saying the craziest stuff I could possibly think of. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I had never done so little actual work in my life and here I was raking in more money than I had ever seen. But on the other hand, it was frightening to know that there was such a huge market for this. And then HLN called me one day asking if I’d want to host a TV show. A TV show!”

Morton hosted Glenn Beck on HLN for two and a half years before signing a deal with Fox News. He hosted his first show on the network on January 19, 2009, the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration. “The last year of this experiment was by far the toughest,” Morton said. “It was one thing to be an apologist for the Bush administration and go after his detractors. The work was mundane and old because Hannity and O’Reilly had already been doing it for years on television. But with a new Democratic president coming into office, I knew I’d have a chance to showcase my creativity as a propagandist.”

Within a year, Morton’s excitement was tempered by the stark realization that his insane rants had actually been resonating with millions of people. “I was trying to get fired,” confessed Morton. “But no matter what I did or said, my ratings just kept going up and up. I thought shedding what were obviously fake tears time and again over 9/11 would do it, but people just ate it up. And then I got the idea to start insinuating that Obama was in league with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. And I thought that would do me in for sure. I mean, we all know how conservatives reacted to people who called Bush ‘Hitler.’ But as you know, not only did I not get fired, my ratings went even higher. You should see the emails I received, thanking me for telling the truth and exposing the Nazi-Stalinist, ACORN-orchestrated plot to destroy America. These weren’t a few isolated emails. This was 85% of the correspondence I got.”

Morton continued, “Then I figured, you know, I’ll just go off the deep end. I’ll just directly attack the half-white, half-black president and call him a racist, which makes no sense whatsoever, but I wanted out of there. It was becoming too much. It was a really daunting task coming up with new red meat conspiracy theories to toss to the viewers. Over the summer I was really grasping at straws with the FEMA camp thing. So I went on Fox & Friends one morning and said something about how this president has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, and that he’s a racist. Don’t ask me what I meant by ‘white culture’ because I didn’t mean anything by it. There is a French culture. A Norwegian culture. An Italian culture. But there is no universal ‘white culture.’ It’s a meaningless term.”

“Well, there was a backlash from liberals, but my bosses at Fox just doubled down even after a several companies pulled their ads from my show. The next thing I knew I was being contacted by Goldline International to hawk precious metals. And I thought, ‘My audience can’t buy gold. They’re not rich.’ But then I realized I could cross the ethics line by plugging gold on my show while simultaneously advertising for Goldline on my free time. When that didn’t get me fired, I decided I had had enough. So here I am today.”

Morton also offered insights into media personalities he encountered during the experiment. “When I was at HLN, I ran into Nancy Grace in the hallways a few times. She’s an incredibly disturbed individual. Maybe bipolar, I don’t know. She’s obsessed with dead, missing, and battered white kids. Once, about two hours before her air time, she was in a panic because a missing kid she had planned on talking about turned up in his parents’ house. He was just hiding. So she was in her office hunched over her computer looking for news about victimized children. I tried to help. I said, ‘Well Nancy, a little girl got kidnapped today in New York.’ Her eyes lit up. She said, ‘Where?’ and I said, ‘Harlem.’ Then she just frowned and went back to her computer.”

Morton also discussed some of the personalities at Fox News, at one point calling Bill O’Reilly a “schoolyard bully” who’s “probably a sexual deviant.” When asked to clarify, Morton responded, “Have you read Those Who Trespass? I wouldn’t have read it, but one day he handed me a copy and said he wanted to know what I thought. It was the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life. Worse than the loofah affidavit.”

About Sean Hannity, Morton said, “Hannity was by far the worst. He’s not conservative. He’s not liberal. He’s not anything. He’s just for whatever the Republican Party is for, and against whatever the Republican Party is against. He’s like a member of the politburo. I don’t think he’s ever had an independent thought in his life.”

“By the way,” Morton added, “Ann Coulter is a guy.”

Conspicuously absent from Morton’s prepared remarks at the press conference was any mention of “Glenn Beck’s” 9/12 project—a mass gathering of disaffected Americans who last summer protested nonexistent tax hikes and other vague ideas such as “spending.” One reporter, however, did inquire about that momentous event in Washington last September.

“Yeah,” said Morton. “I’m not proud of that, but I wanted to see how many people I could get to physically show up at a specific place and time. It’s one thing to get millions of people to tune into your show from the comfort of their homes and cars, but the 9/12 project was designed specifically to see how many people would jump when I said to jump. A lot of people were wondering why I didn’t show up to my own march in D.C. The reason is that it just would’ve been too much. I did not want to see what I had created. I did not want to have to give a rousing and insincere speech. I did not want to see the rotten fruits of my deceitful labor.”

“I need a drink.”

Morton’s book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid will be available sometime in the fall.

- Max

Bill O'Reilly Still Whining About Secularism

Note: The video I had of O’Reilly’s Talking Points Memo was removed from YouTube, so I’ve substituted this segment about the same exact thing where he makes the exact same stupid argument.

So, Bill O’Reilly is miffed because President Obama refused to spend thousands of dollars to fire up a few jet fighters to do a flyover at some “God & Country Festival” in Idaho. Big deal. What have those freeloading Idahoans ever done for the rest of the country, anyway? As one astute observer has commented, Idaho blows. Like most Red States, Idaho gets more money from the federal government than it pays in federal taxes. Idaho gets about $1.21 for every $1 it pays to the federal government. Compare that to my state—a Blue State—which gets about $0.82 for each tax dollar we pay. Red States, for all their complaints about federal spending, are actually financial parasites on the backs of more prosperous (and mostly Democratic) states, leeching money so they can dick around with statues of the Ten Commandments and teach Bronze Age mythology in science classrooms. But I digress.

O’Reilly says, “There is no specific religion in play at that festival.” Having known nothing about this festival, I still knew O’Reilly’s claim had to be bullshit. I was right, per usual. If he had taken five seconds to do an internet search, he would’ve found that the festival’s own website declares, “Our mission is primarily about spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. We believe this Festival, started in 1967, is an incredible tool to share this Good News…” It also states that the festival “is an unashamedly Christian event.” Now unless O’Reilly doesn’t consider Christianity a “specific religion,” he is either lying or hasn’t done his homework. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell because he has such a long and storied history of misinformation that one often doesn’t know where O’Reilly’s incompetence ends and his deception begins.

The festival itself aside, Bill-O is pissed because unlike his predecessors, Obama actually decided to heed the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by refusing government resources to some Bible thumpers on Planet Idaho. O’Reilly likes to throw around the word “secular” like it’s an insult instead of a word for people who ascribe to Jeffersonian principles in matters of church and state. Obama’s a “secular guy.” Oh no, he wants to keep religion out of government, and government out of religion. Cry me a fucking river. Can’t these slaves of Jesus just be happy for their own goddamn servitude without using money from the rest of us to promote their abhorrent and backward beliefs? Be a slave on your own dime. Don’t use my tax dollars to perpetuate your morally and intellectually bankrupt fairy tale of vicarious salvation.

O’Reilly also says that “to diminish spiritually by denying the good folks of Idaho a flyover is simply stupid.” Is he really saying that the spirituality of the festival attendees will be diminished because they won’t get to see some very expensive instruments of destruction fly over their heads? Bill-O and I must have very different definitions of spirituality. And I love how O’Reilly says that secularists are being disrespectful to people of faith. We’re not disrespectful to people of faith, but faith itself because it’s ridiculous and often harmful. Several times I’ve had people of faith tell me that I’m going to burn in hell for eternity because of my unbelieving ways. Now that’s disrespectful.

Then, in a remark against secularism, O’Reilly states, “The secular culture, which President Obama embraces, is mainly concerned with things of this world, like global warming.” Think about that statement for a second. The secular culture is mainly concerned with things of this world. Well what world should we be concerned with? Does O’Reilly think we should be worrying about tax policy on fucking Neptune? Or what the seating arrangements will be in a nonexistent afterlife? Literally, Earth to O’Reilly, bring it in, Bill. Then in a bullshit non sequitur, he asks where this is getting us and starts talking about the reluctance of China and India to take preventative measures on global warming. Bill says they’re not going to help on global warming, so he basically suggests we pray for the problem to go away instead of doing our part, even if others won’t. Seriously, I do not understand the Right’s feverish opposition on this issue. Even if you think global warming is a complete myth, is it really such a bad idea to want to curb emissions and cut back on pollution? This should be a bipartisan issue just like murder and child rape. Then again, one should never underestimate the ability of business interests to corrupt public discussion by lining the pockets of their favorite politicians who are all too happy to repeat canned industry lines about the evils of regulation.

Finally from Bill, the classic demented refrain of the delusional Religious Right: “The U.S.A. has become the strongest, most prosperous country on this earth largely because of its Judeo-Christian traditions.” Bitch, please. Few claims are more revolting than the idea that we would be without moral sense had the hallucinating Moses not promulgated the Ten Commandments to the filthy, illiterate and credulous fools at the foot of Mount Sinai. Those who insist that our laws are based on the commandments simply don’t give humans enough credit to be able to figure out important things on their own, like how the prohibition of murder and theft would be conducive to the perpetuation of any society. Or maybe it’s because the Christians who try to impose the commandments cannot understand themselves why allowing murder is a bad idea. This would explain their continued insistence that the Ten Commandments be displayed everywhere except in Paris Hilton’s vagina, even though there’s enough room for two stone tablets.

Secularism is railed against by ignorant thugs as some kind of subversive ideological force permeating American culture. In reality, secularism is not an ideology, but a safeguard against (religious) ideological encroachments on our society. It is a fine complement to America’s republican form of government, whereby the potentially dangerous and violent passions of the people are diluted through the channels of representation. In a similar fashion, secularism is an insurance policy against religious zealots—Christian or otherwise—who would endeavor to mix religion and government, or worse: impose theocracy in America where God and Jesus would be the chief policymakers in what would be a most nightmarish scenario. We often take it for granted that the Religious Right is not allowed to advance its wretched agenda in wholesale on the rest of the country because of the First Amendment. But we can easily imagine how matters might be otherwise. Secularism is the only thing standing between America as it is now, and a Christianized version of Iran. If America were to become a theocracy, it would perhaps begin with the most minor of religious infractions on free society, and gradually grow until it has rotted the roots of our government, toppling the tree of democracy and sending it crashing earthward to the dirt and filth from which it had managed to ascend to the heavens.

- Max

Bill O'Reilly Is An Asshole

Asshole

Bill O’Reilly is an asshole. I’m sure you already knew that because it would be hard not to know. For the last thirteen years he has hosted the O’Reilly Factor on Faux News, where he likes to masquerade as a hard-hitting politically independent “journalist” with no agenda. But in reality, O’Reilly is a douchey, blowhard, partisan hack whose shallow and deceptive “reporting” gives a one-dimensional picture of how he sees things. In this twisted world as envisioned by O’Reilly’s warped mind, he is the righteous defender of “traditional American values” against the evil machinations of college professors, Hollywood actors, and George Soros.

If you don’t believe that Bill-O thinks of himself in this way, peruse his latest piece of shit book, Culture Warrior—that is if you can tolerate reading it for more than eight consecutive seconds. (Don’t buy it, though. You’ll only encourage him.) I barely could myself. From cover to cover, O’Reilly has stuffed Culture Warrior with self-promotion and self-pity, making himself out to be some sort of living martyr for the “traditional values” cause. He even refers to himself and those who share his views as—you guessed it—culture warriors, or traditional warriors. Now, I don’t get queasy very easily, but the book’s sheer lameness combined with its overall holier-than-thou attitude had my stomach doing cartwheels. Needless to say, when I browsed Culture Warrior in Barnes & Noble, I nearly vomited all over the “New Fiction” section, which is exactly where this steaming turd should have been.

One of O’Reilly’s favorite hobbies is railing against “far left” figures, which for him means anyone who regularly advances liberal positions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—a very mainstream Democrat—is far left according to O’Reilly. So is venture capitalist extraordinaire George Soros. Objectively speaking, anything to the left of moderate is “far left” as far as O’Reilly is concerned, and so he ends up using this phrase as much as he uses the word “the.” As a result the words “far left” mean virtually nothing when they come from the bullshitting mouth of this professional prick.

A favorite tactic of O’Reilly’s is to demonize liberalism by repeating some offbeat lefty quote or argument advanced by a totally marginal public figure, and present it as proof positive that the country is in a liberal-guided moral decline. Take O’Reilly’s latest syndicated column written in his usual pedestrian prose. Right away he has a warning for us: “With America moving left politically and socially, it might be wise to take a moment and consider what might happen to kids if the drift continues.” Sounds serious, Bill. What, pray tell, would come of this continued leftward drift?

“The result is grim. Children in a dozen states have been charged with child pornography for ‘sexting’— sending nude pictures of themselves or others using cyberspace. A published study last December claims that 20 percent of American children had participated in some form of ‘sexting,’ including the extreme act of kids actually photographing themselves having sex.”

First off, can we all just admit that it is absurd to charge kids under child porn statutes because they sent racy photos of themselves or even others on cell phones? I’m not going to say there’s nothing wrong with some of what O’Reilly is describing, but it’s ridiculous that a kid could be convicted on child porn charges and have to register as a sex offender for the next thirty years. But O’Reilly isn’t interested in this angle of the story; for he has bigger and more liberal dragons to slay.

According to Bill-O, there has been insufficient negative reaction to the sexting phenomenon. In fact, he is appalled to find that somebody is actually saying that sexting is relatively innocuous. Who is it? Is it our Democratic president? The liberal Speaker of the House? Maybe it’s lefty Janeane Garofalo? Nope. It’s Peter Cumming.

I know what you’re thinking. Who the fuck is Peter Cumming? It’s a good question, and not one we’d easily be able to answer, but thankfully Bill-O saves us from this research project by telling us. Somehow, he got his ogre paws on some comments made by Cumming, who as it turns out is an obscure Canadian academic who delivered a paper at an equally obscure symposium. What did Professor Cumming say that got O’Reilly’s sagging Irish face all rosy red? Well, first the professor stated that sexting is no worse than old-fashioned spin the bottle, which actually makes sense because spin the bottle requires physical contact and can easily escalate to sexual activity. Anyway, Cumming also said,

“In Bush’s America, [sic] is there no middle ground between child pornography, sexual assault, abuse and exploitation on the one hand and children’s ‘abstinence’ on the other? When, in Western culture, did nudity become pornography, did children’s sexuality become perverse, and when and how and why have we forgotten children’s participatory rights as sexual beings?”

Now this is O’Reilly quoting Cumming, and if you watch Bill-O’s segment on the Non-factor about this, he repeats Cumming’s words, but they are slightly different. This suggests that O’Reilly has either intentionally tweaked Cumming’s words, or was too lazy to make sure he quoted him accurately. Either way, O’Reilly is aghast that other academics haven't come out against this professor, ostensibly demonstrating that academia lacks moral sense. But this would be to assume that people actually know who Cumming is, which they don't, professors included. In any case, O’Reilly proceeds to accuse him of espousing the philosophy of NAMBLA (North American Man-Boy Love Association), failing to recognize that the very sexting he’s been talking about is teen-to-teen interaction, and not teen-to-adult. But if you're O'Reilly, why stop to make this distinction when you can imply that some liberal academic is a pro child-fucking creep of the first order?

Unfortunately I was unable to find a copy of Cumming’s paper, so I don’t really know what his exact point was. I think it would be fair to say, however, that the professor was saying that Americans have a very puritanical attitude towards sex, and that nudity in and of itself ought not to be considered pornography. Consequently, the professor seems to be courageous enough to extend this principle to teenagers amongst one another. For O’Reilly to suggest that he’s in a league with NAMBLA based on these remarks is unbelievably dishonest. Because O’Reilly wants to convince people he’s right, he sets up a false dichotomy where people must choose between his position and NAMBLA’s. Given this choice, how could he not be right?

So that’s a neat trick from O’Reilly, but too bad his little anecdote about Cumming, which is the crux of his argument, is totally irrelevant as far as Bill-O’s thesis is concerned. Recall his opening statement: “With America moving left politically and socially, it might be wise to take a moment and consider what might happen to kids if the drift continues.” And how did he “consider” what might happen? By citing the remarks of, and lack of outcry to, Peter Cumming, an unknown, constituent-less, Canadian professor who teaches at a Canadian university, and who delivered those remarks at a symposium held in Canada. And so apparently this is somehow indicative of a moral decline in America, according to O’Reilly. Wow Bill, you really knocked it out of the park on this one. Shithead.

-Max