Catching up with my Glenn Beck notes

For less than $1.00 a week, we're watching Glenn Beck on the internet. It sort of looks like his old show on Fox News, but longer with more audience participation, and probably fewer commercials. I don't know that he needs commercials as much as before (leftist groups were threatening advertisers) because he's made a huge bundle by offering subscriptions-- 230,000 paying subscribers even before the launch. That eclipsed the viewership for the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Some things are the same--the chalk board, a monologue (although much longer), religious leaders as guests, discussions with authors, an audience of intelligent viewers, but there are some new things like some attempts at comedy by other actors, and his own news organization presenting news stories. Sounds like he's got some great opportunities for interns and journalists who want to work 12-14 hour days and do "real investigative journalism." It was one of his people who followed up on the Wall Street protestor/law student Robert Stephens who turned out to be the son of wealthy Minnesotans who actually hadn't lost their home as he announced to the world. Because he was black (in my opinion), the lefties ran with the story without checking it.

Other stories this past week noted along the way:

Big story on history of unions and corruption; billions in tax money going to the unions; you can't be forced to join a union, but you can be forced to pay their dues; top 2 visitors at the White House are union thugs Trumka (AFL-CIO) charged in the death of Eddie York a non-union contractor and Andy Stern (SEIU); create a crisis and collapse the economy is Stephen Lerner's mantra; the unions, not the students, are coordinating the violence on Wall Street right now.

Glenn was in Israel in August for a very successful show--and at the ned of these 2 hour segments, there's often a clip from that event; tonight in response to a student who said he was having problems doing a topic on Israel because of the liberal professors Glenn said, "The Gates of hell open up if you support Israel; he also told students not to accept the revisionist term "anti-zionist" or "anti-Isarel," because they are, in fact, anti-Jew, anti-Semite; a Fatwa, which GB considers a death threat, has been issued on a Muslim who appeared with Glenn Beck in Israel.

Glenn said he knows what's wrong with his generation, and asked the student audience what's wrong with their generation. They are afraid to speak up and don't do any research; even if teachers' lectures are OK the bibliographies are biased and one-sided; one student of economics had to read Paul Krugman's book (he thinks Keynes saved capitalism); another said a good friend had told him that Karl Marx invented capitalism (and this is a college student!); Glenn interviewed the head of the diversity bake sale which is in the news right now (based prices of their baked goods on customers' race and gender).

Speaking of race and gender, I've noticed that GBTV has many minority and female researchers, camera staff and reporters--I haven't seen that on network or cable TV.

One day he had sort of a history lesson on Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist of the 19th century. Said Douglas understood the 3/5 clause--that there would have been no United States or eventual abolition without it because the South would have counted every slave in the census; Douglass was at first critical of Lincoln, but they became friends; the word SLAVERY didn't appear in the U.S. Constitution, but was in the Conferate States constitution--in fact was required for admission; he was the only man at a women's rights meeting in 1895, the year he died.

One of Glenn's frequent themes is the peril of National Socialism, aka Nazism. He spent a lot of time discussing how naive academia was in the 1930s catching on. He says progressive are always on the wrong side of dictators when it comes to Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao. Harvard welcomed Nazi representatives and in the 1990s the Black Muslims called Jews "blood suckers." GB says, don't wait for progressives to change. The first place in Germany that anti-semitism became acceptable was the university campuses. There are workshops for anti-Jews at UC Irvine (I haven't checked that) and UC Berkeley encourages conservatives NOT to sign up for anti-Israel courses.