Alex Jones' propaganda wars

[Serapis Bey]

Yes, we face serious challenges to future material liberty due to federal debt, but within the financial constraints of meeting that burden, this country is going to remain very free.

The challenges extend far beyond federal debt, which is actually public debt, owed by you and me, our children, and our children's children. Utilitarians, such as progressives, are quick to accept collectivist redistribution as a price that must be paid to stave off violence against us from the lower classes. The immediate problem, even within this framework - and as always happens in collectivist systems - is that the "price" we must pay has been increasing at an exponential rate as more and more become dependent upon the self-perpetuating political spoils system that feeds and incentivises them. One need only examine what has developed with SSDI over the past 15 years: recipients have more than doubled in both real and percentage terms, now over 10 million Americans. A trivial number of these individuals are actually so disabled they can't perform meaningful work, yet all are now living off of quite-generous government checks for the rest of their lives while producing nothing in return. It is the expanding administrative state and its progressive enthusiasts that have expanded this system of producers and takers to an alarming degree over the past decade.

Kacy's laser-like focus on the religious, Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and the like is misplaced at best and destructive at worst. He is free to disagree with religious views or conspiracy theories, and as such, they pose little real threat to him or his standard of living. Conversely, he is not free to "disagree" to hand over an ever-increasing portion of his income to the state, or to live under the mandates and restrictions of socialized insurance and health care. He is not free to live in a society which passes roughly 40,000 new federal, state, and municipal laws every year, all of which he is "on notice" for and must be in compliance. Whatever else Alex Jones may believe, he is an opponent of this systematic encroachment on our individualism. If we are going to publicly ridicule and shame these entertainers - who are in no way intended for Kacy's audience in the first place - then we should focus on those pundits who are actively promoting expansion of the administrative and welfare state rather than opposing it, even if they do so from a religious standpoint that Kacy happens to find distasteful.

RB, you strike me as an intelligent fellow. I'd be interested in your opinion of the latest TLP article:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/04/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_5.html#more

By the way, welcome to OL.

[Guyau]

Dennis says we’re in the last hour of freedom. Soon, food riots, burning, and looting. How long is that hour, how soon your scenario of mass violence, Dennis? Not happening. Your life and mine will end, even if two decades from now, in the enormous freedom individuals enjoy in this country today. And it will continue, free, productive, and technologically advancing decades beyond us (barring no all-out nuclear war along the way).

Dan, welcome to OL. First paragraph, yes. Second, no. There are freedoms precious in addition to freedom in commercial production—not to be demoted to secondary importance, no mere “happens to find distasteful.” Individual rights must be defended against both the Left and the Right. No trickery or fantastical paranoid fear mongering secures freedom. Public rationality is key to comprehension of and respect for individual rights.

–Stephen (in Lynchburg)

[Robert Baratheon]

I'd be interested in your opinion of the latest TLP article:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/04/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_5.html#more

The author is indisputably correct on the substantive points. It is becoming widely recognized that SSI/SSDI is in fact just the newest welfare system sweeping otherwise-unemployable individuals under the proverbial rug and paying them for their acquiescence in the process. A technical point - SSI/SSDI recipients don't pay a wide variety of payroll taxes and all of their medical expenses are covered by the state. Therefore, they aren't living on quite as meager a take-home allowance as he makes them out to be.

He spends a sentence or two at the end of the article discussing the inefficiencies of the SSI/SSDI-welfare model and the massive bureaucracies and cottage industries necessary to maintain it. Though I don't particularly like the idea of an enormous standing army, I will point out that military service is, and has historically been, a far superior method of dealing with such otherwise-unemployable individuals. Though neither system results in anything tangible being produced, the military-welfare model at least encouraged individuals to stay physically fit, mentally alert, and engaged in respectable society; also preparing them with life skills for the possibility of returning to the market economy in the future. The SSI/SSDI-welfare model is a much more invidious variation in redistributionism, encouraging sloth, seclusion, deceit, and mental and physical breakdown resulting in skyrocketing medical costs (again, paid entirely by the state).

I don't view the situation as quite as hopeless or inevitable as the author. He sees the number of such undesirables as fixed and unchanging, a given in a "post-scarcity" society. I see individuals as more malleable and swayed by public policy. Basic economics tells us that if we subsidize an activity, we get more of it.

[Brant Gaede]

Robert, I have to say you've a hell of a name. I admire your hard, knowledgeable moral and intellectual grip on contemporary issues.

--Brant

edit: wait a minute!--that's not your name! (mox nix)

[Brant Gaede]

.

Kacy is here to me a breath of fresh air. Radiantly sound.

Gee. Where does that leave me? In an intellectual wheelchair with halitosis?

--Brant

I want what Johnny got!

No, no Brant. The wheelchair is a triumphal chariot, and the halitosis is from the slave whispering in your ear.

Now there is Carol at her best, as, an artful, Aparachick [sp ?]...

You go girl!

A...

Wait a minute! Don't I get credit for continually setting her up?

--Brant

[caroljane]

.

Kacy is here to me a breath of fresh air. Radiantly sound.

Gee. Where does that leave me? In an intellectual wheelchair with halitosis?

--Brant

I want what Johnny got!

No, no Brant. The wheelchair is a triumphal chariot, and the halitosis is from the slave whispering in your ear.

Now there is Carol at her best, as, an artful, Aparachick [sp ?]...

You go girl!

A...

Wait a minute! Don't I get credit for continually setting her up?

--Brant

All the credit, Georgie dear.

-Gracie

[dennislmay]

How long is that hour, how soon your scenario of mass violence, Dennis?

Too many variables to know. It could be a soft start we are already in the beginnings of or a hard start that has yet to occur.

It could be any time from today to a few years from now. It could be postponed again if there are sweeping elections in 2014

as there was in 1980 and 1994. All you can do is evaluate the probabilities.

With 46 cents of every federal dollar printed or borrowed, enormous debt off the books, Europe in even worse trouble, and

our manufacturing base largely gone the situation is worse than during the last two times the crisis was temporarily averted.

Public apathy and growth of the dependent class are at all time highs so it is not clear there will be any turning around before

Great Depression II and/or WWIII hit. One way or another the books are likely cleared through the equivalent of bankruptcy

because of the lack of will to cut spending and regulation. The Progressives are a minority but they control the government,

education and the media. They want collapse and authoritarian socialism - I don't see what is going to stop them.

Dennis

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I tend to be more optimistic than Dennis, but he's not Chicken Little. Here's a perspective from the left (Bill Maher) on the USA becoming a police state.

http://youtu.be/OOUdeJqpt8s

I actually lived in a police state for a while (Brazil under the military dictatorship in the 70's). People get the wrong impression of what that's like.

Normal everyday living goes on. You get up, go to work, go to the grocery store, watch TV, do it all. You just can't do or say certain things, especially things like criticize the state. That will bring the scary dudes in the middle of the night to haul your ass off.

There is also a lot of corruption. If you are an under-the-radar kind of person and learn the ropes, you can live a relatively free life. Some people get really upset about being forced to become corrupt, though. I know I suffered greatly with this. Then one day I threw in the towel and my middle name became trouble (until I crashed and burned), but that's another story.

Also, the tanks and so forth Maher showed sporadically do happen. It's like living in a place where there are earthquakes at times. You never know when they are going to hit or how violently. You just try to have an exit strategy.

The real problem comes if you start making good money or start becoming famous. You have to make peace with the mafia, so to speak, or they will take you down.

It's not really a good way to live, but it's not a doomsday scenario, either.

The people here in the USA don't realize what they've got. The real deal is being able to make it on your own instead of being herded into a lifestyle and told what the limits of your life are, how far you can go and where. That is what is really at stake with freedom. That and the ability to correct wrongs based on merit instead of bribery.

It's hard to get through to folks who are more or less satisfied. My father used to use a phrase after eating a big meal, "fat, dumb and happy." (Man, that brought back memories. ) That attitude, on an intellectual level, kind of describes the mentality of many of the people I see in the USA since I have been back. It's not easy to penetrate a well-ingrained passive emotion like well-fed complacency and say something bad is coming.

btw - I'm not referring to Stephen's optimism. That is based on a different view, and I actually share a good part of it.

Michael

[dennislmay]

I tend to be more optimistic than Dennis, but he's not Chicken Little.

The time it takes to root out deep corruption makes the issue much more problematic than it appears on the surface.

For 25+ years the state of Missouri would not touch local police corruption, the Feds were called in a number of times

on the same issue - same result. It wasn't until one of the local cops embezzled federal money that the little empire

began to unravel.

Contrast that with what happened a few years ago next to my workplace. Someone had made a homemade pipe bomb

and apparently lost it or threw it out - in any case it was laying in a ditch next to the shop. Someone walking on the

road saw it and called the cops. Boom SWAT and bomb disposal from Kansas City was there not one minute later

than it took to drive. No time for local corruption but someone's big firecracker woke up the state.

The deep corruption issue exists throughout all of society and government at all levels. It varies considerably from

place to place but exists everywhere. Fixing the fiscal crisis involves fixing deep corruption and there seems to be

no interest in tackling that problem. Insider trading in the congress was fixed for a few months before being undone

again - as soon as the spotlight was off they went right back to business as usual. John Kerry was one of the worst

offenders on the insider trading issue - now he has been promoted.

I can imagine several scenarios where the US could survive and thrive in the short term but all would require

unlikely political events to take place. The majority of the public simply isn't well informed enough or engaged to

make a difference. They will not be sufficiently upset or motivated to make real change until things really hurt by which

time it is probably too late to fix things by rational means. Hence the state rolls in to enforce a fix at the point of a gun.

Dennis

[Serapis Bey]

I actually lived in a police state for a while (Brazil under the military dictatorship in the 70's). People get the wrong impression of what that's like.

Normal everyday living goes on. You get up, go to work, go to the grocery store, watch TV, do it all. You just can't do or say certain things, especially things like criticize the state. That will bring the scary dudes in the middle of the night to haul your ass off.

Not unlike Middletown USA, no?

There is also a lot of corruption. If you are an under-the-radar kind of person and learn the ropes, you can live a relatively free life.

Adapt or Die.

Good advice, all things considered.

The real problem comes if you start making good money or start becoming famous. You have to make peace with the mafia, so to speak, or they will take you down.

Please expand on this? Who are the Mafia in this example, for starters?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Who are the Mafia in this example, for starters?

SB,

In Brazil, it was the military government (and their families and cronies).

Play ball or die.

But if you don't have jack, they rarely bother you.

Michael

[KacyRay]

Sorry, I just don't see doomsday in the tealeaves like you, Dennis.

What I do see, and what I like seeing, are laws such as DADT being struck down, the drag war slowly vanishing, theocrats being marginalized, conspiracy theorists and Limbaugh-level pundits being relegated to the “discount rack” of the national conversation, abortion remaining available, etc…

I’d rather be impoverished than imprisoned. I like vices being legal. I like freedom to live my life how I choose. When I hear you make your case, I hear one thing and one thing only – you’re afraid of your wallet being encroached upon. And while I share that fear, I have to tell you it concerns me a whole lot less than when I hear theocrats on the radio saying that gay folks should be imprisoned.

If there’s one consistency I’ve noticed about those on the hard right as against those on the hard left, it’s that the former are generally very concerned about themselves, whereas the latter tend to understand that a right taken from one of us is a right taken from all of us. It’s the reason that my sympathies changed some time back.

Dennis, if you’re wondering why 46 cents of every dollar is borrowed or printed, it might have a whole lot more to do with 2 unfunded wars being waged over the last decade than with the creeping onset of socialism. You do remember the Bush years, right? I remember that’s when the housing market crashed (just after I bought my first house), that’s when the biggest recession of my lifetime happened, and gas prices shot skyward.

Those are real, tangible things I remember happening – things that affected me directly. Was it the onset of socialism that caused them, or that blazing irresponsibility of a political faction that was more concerned with making sure those scary Dems don’t take power than with electing someone who had their head screwed on straight? (I voted for Perot in 96, btw).

No, it isn’t religion I’m concerned with – it’s theocracy. And if, during a recovering economy, you’re more worried about the big bad socialist monster that isn’t anywhere close to our door than the theocrats that have already infiltrated our culture, then I have to wonder how your priorities got to where they are.

But again, here we have the “monster just outside the door” alarmism that seems so appealing to far-right wingers. It’s no wonder you love Beck so much… he’s an endless resource of the fear you seem to thrive on.

The good news is that, while you’re busy being afraid of the big, bad anti-christ-Obama-socialist-boogeyman… the rest of us are just sitting back smiling, watching as the value of our houses rise, deficits go down, wars come to an end, unemployment rates fall, mortgage rates drop, freedom expands to new demographics, and guys like Beck get relegated to the discount rack.

You like fear? You go with it brother. May it serve you well.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kacy,

I know what bothers me about your discourse.

It's the false dichotomy.

For instance, Beck is not on the discount rack. On the contrary, his business is booming, he just got the disruptive innovation award at the TreBeCa Film Festival, he's building a freedom-based theme park in the molds of Disney, he's actively involved with people from Singularity University and the talk about what they're cooking up together always involves cutting-edge technology like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and so on, He is intimate friends with atheist Penn Jillette and constantly has him on the show--calling him a good moral man (and receiving the compliment in return). And on and on and on. I can give you links and sources to prove all this. It's all public.

Yet the Soros-media-machine party line is that he is finished. That he wants a theocracy. Yada yada yada.

You constantly echo the sound-bytes of that machine and I'm not sure the facts have any impact on you when they are contrary. It's the cybernetic system kicking in. One day you will grudgingly see a sound-byte is inaccurate when the fact disproving it gets right in your face, then the next you go back to repeating the same sound-byte, if not some of the most distorted schlock from the Soros-machine that totally negates the discussion the day before. It just wipes out the facts you agreed existed.

This used to confuse me when I would see people do it because I did not think they were dishonest just like I do not think you are. I later discovered it's just the cybernetic course correction with the prefrontal cortex turned off.

We all do mental cybernetic course corrections, too. It's part of the way the brain works. My problem is the programmed result you adopted, and it's not even your liberal views. That's not the program. That's merely one side of the game that is the real program you adopted: the conservative-liberal dichotomy as all inclusive.

The narrative goes like this: The world would be lollipops and roses if not for THEM. THE EVIL LUNATICS. THEM THEM THEM. (This applies to both sides, since both do it.)

I simply do not believe in your dichotomy as the background, There are no evil conservatives against virtuous liberals or vice-versa.

This is a false playing field. The entire conflict is false.

Here's how it works,

The pattern is always the same with both. Conservatives like idiotic wars but believe in self-reliance, so they need bigger government. Liberals don't like war, but like to give handouts like they are going out of style, so they need bigger government. Conservatives want the USA to be oil-independent, so they need bigger government. Liberals want the USA to get off oil, so they need bigger government. Conservative don't want abortion, so they need bigger government for enforcement. Liberals want women to have the choice to abort, so they need bigger government to supply abortion services for free. And on and on and on it goes.

Lots of vituperation and hatred are slung around in the vilest terms, but the government always gets bigger.

I am against bigger government no matter which side it is on. Your rhetoric always pulls toward a polemic within that "double bind." This, by the way, is the technical name for it in persuasion, A double bind in this context means no matter which side you fight on, no matter who wins, the outcome is always the same: bigger government.

Here's a typical double bind as taught. You ask a person you want to meet, but who has not agreed to meet you, the following question: Would you rather us meet on Monday or is Tuesday better for you? That way the person has the illusion of choice, but the outcome, the meeting, is the same in both cases. The person actually had no choice.

This is what I object to the most with this false liberal-conservative dichotomy. It removes smaller government from the discourse. Those who believe in smaller government do not really get a choice.

Fortunately this is changing. Smaller government is becoming a talking point. It always gets swallowed up when the elections actually hit, but at least it's on the table on the way there. And a few small government politicians even make it to the election and get elected. That's a lot better than before.

Anyway, let's pull a tooth or two out of the double bind, shall we?

People like Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh are not lunatics. Neither are people like Barack Obama or Chris Matthews psychopaths.

It's silly to call them those names. Like it or not, all are productive honorable human beings (and I say that really hating Obama's politics and marketing manipulations just as I imagine you hate Palin's religion and conservative woman image, and ditto for similar things with Matthews and Limbaugh).

Jim Jones was a lunatic. Ted Bundy was a psychopath. Need I go on?

There's your lunatic and psychopath.

Palin and Limbaugh and Obama and Matthews have nothing to do with that world.

The only thing that over-the-top rhetoric does is make people emotionally invested in the unfairness of the insult so they deflect their attention from the government getting bigger.

True, it's all out in the open, but it's really nothing but a double bind smoke and mirrors routine.

Michael

[dennislmay]

Dennis, if you’re wondering why 46 cents of every dollar is borrowed or printed, it might have a whole lot more to do with 2 unfunded wars being waged over the last decade than with the creeping onset of socialism.

You might want to get out your grade school rules of addition and subtraction on that one and an 1800's high school textbook on the Constitution to understand the enumerated powers.

Dennis

[Robert Baratheon]

As Michael points out, there is a pattern in Kacy's posts that is injurious to good-faith debate, and that those of us earnestly seeking truth find frustrating. Kacy uses false dichotomies to reinforce an us-versus-them framework of convenience that largely tracks with liberal/conserative lines perpetuated by the same popular entertainers he claims to find repugnant.

It is often helpful to make us-versus-them distinctions when outlining legitimate philosophical differences between opposing ideologies - assuming they are based in evidence and objective reality. One such meaningful distinction is between those who wish to expand dependence upon the state and those who wish to reduce it. The difference is that Kacy's dichotomies are based almost entirely upon the intellectually bankrupt red-team/blue-team framework of popular entertainment (along with sweeping generalizations about each "side") and his lumping of socially acceptable targets, such as Beck, into one category or the other is based on his own mental laziness rather than any actual evidence in the public record.

To take one example, Kacy defends his nearly exclusive attacks on "right-leaning" libertarian/conservative pundits as follows: "I'd rather be impoverished than imprisoned. I like vices being legal." There is little actual evidence that Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, or the rest of his favored punching bags actually want people imprisoned on a mass scale or seek to outlaw all vices. Quite the contrary, in fact. But that is the popular caricature of right-leaning pundits that Kacy has decided to be true, not based on any actual evidence, but based entirely out of his own desire to be part of what he calls the "right side of history" alongside his carefully cultivated social-media echo-chamber of progressives, enablers, and revisionist historians.

[Serapis Bey]

Dennis, if you’re wondering why 46 cents of every dollar is borrowed or printed, it might have a whole lot more to do with 2 unfunded wars being waged over the last decade than with the creeping onset of socialism.

You might want to get out your grade school rules of addition and subtraction on that one and an 1800's high school textbook on the Constitution to understand the enumerated powers.

Dennis

Kacy, a quick (1 minute) Google search turned this up. Feel free to dispute the source, I have a feeling the numbers can be confirmed elsewhere. One simple line in the report:

• In 2012 entitlements were nearly 62 percent of total spending, while defense dropped to less than one-fifth (18.7 percent) of the budget.

I can understand why liberals say things like "war is the cause of our debt crisis" -- because they're...like, farging liberals.

Why do you do it?

EDIT: This is a prettier graph:

[Brant Gaede]

Too much on Kacy, here.

--Brant

[Serapis Bey]

Too much on Kacy, here.

--Brant

Perhaps. But RB and I have been birthed from the same pits of Hell. Wanna join our gang?

[Serapis Bey]

I'd be interested in your opinion of the latest TLP article:

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/04/the_terrible_awful_truth_about_5.html#more

I don't view the situation as quite as hopeless or inevitable as the author. He sees the number of such undesirables as fixed and unchanging, a given in a "post-scarcity" society. I see individuals as more malleable and swayed by public policy. Basic economics tells us that if we subsidize an activity, we get more of it.

We might not have a choice. You propose involuntary conscription, but the political feasibility of that is questionable (time will tell). More to the point, when you say, "preparing them with life skills for the possibility of returning to the market economy in the future", what reason do you have for supposing there will be any jobs suitable for such people in this rapidly accelerating technological society? Did you happen to miss this article when I first posted it?

I believe we are in a new epoch where analogies to the Industrial Revolution are no longer germane. The jump in competency required to go from "weaver" to "power loom operator" is an order of magnitude different than going from "factory line worker" to "computer programmer."

Of course, my analysis is moot if you (like most Objectivists) consider intelligence to be infinitely malleable, such that a toothless hillbilly can become a physicist with just enough education, volition and Rea$on. I'm not so sanguine.

In order for immortality to exist, most of the human race will need to be destroyed -- and it will be. At first, of course, there will be the obligatory moaning over the "tragedy." But, within a few months, this destruction will be seen as a happy and necessary event, just as euthanasia will, in time, be seen as a "new" solution to the "problems" of over-population and the funding of Social Security systems. (The scenes at the conclusion of Stanley Kubrick's brilliant movie Dr. Strangelove present an excellent example of this process[...]

Even with horror and death aside, few can tolerate complete success. It leads to boredom and to the final realization that we are all food within the belly of a giant monster whose final goals we only have a glimmer of -- and the glimmer we see is not comforting[...]

Everything is part of the problem and there are no solutions from a conventional point of view...millions die daily and millions are born to take their place...the planet is alive as a stomach is alive -- it digests everything. -- C.S. Hyatt, 1994

Do you recall the discussion we had some years ago where I brought up the possibility of a Minimum Consumption Entitlement? I was just chewing ideas at the time, but perhaps I was more prescient than you? (Damn, I'm good) It looks like with the way things are going, we just might end up with some socialism in this country, not because of Marxists, but by the cruel hand of reality.

So who's crying now, Mr. LiberTARDian?

HAVE AT ME BRO

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

For those who think there is no way in hell there could come a dark time amidst the abundance we have all around us, I can think of one that is quite plausibe.

An effective Electromagnetic pulse weapon attack.

If the electric grid system goes out in the country and takes a few weeks to be restored (since our backup repair system on that scale is nonexistent), there will be gangs and looting everywhere like no one can imagine.

Talk about needing the Second Amendment in that situation...

Michael

[KacyRay]

Too much on Kacy, here.

--Brant

Not sure which you meant here Brant...

Too much piling on? Nah, SB sees the world through death-colored lenses anyway, so there's very little weight in his doomsday predictions for me to crumble under. I've been listening to how awful things are from him for years now as life seems to get better and better.

Too much evidence against my position that the USA will actually survive and continue on without transforming into a socialist nightmare? Nah. I don't see it happening. I don't think the Democrat's reign will last forever, but when it finally relinquishes its dominance, I don't think it will be to the GOP. I think it will be to a more centrist, libertarian-minded group.

I can't imagine a government running with no taxes at all. But I think Ron Paul had it right regarding the Federal Reserve (with which the US government probably needs to cut all ties), a non-interventionist policy, cutting foreign aid, ending the war on drugs, reducing entitlements, etc. I can no longer support the man Ron Paul (for many reasons), but I think a lot of his policy ideas have gained traction and may give rise to a "New Republican" party - maybe a faction of the old GOP or even a complete purge of the remnants of the Cheney faction and a complete rebranding of the Republican Party that I can actually put my support behind.

Until then, I'll have to just endure SB's charges that I'm a bleeding heart liberaltarian and somehow find a way to sleep at night knowing that the world as we know it is coming to an end tomorrow... every single day.

[KacyRay]

Until then, I'll have to just endure SB's charges that I'm a bleeding heart liberaltarian and somehow find a way to sleep at night knowing that the world as we know it is coming to an end tomorrow... every single day.

In the spirit of fairness... SB isn't really one of these guys who believes the world will end tomorrow, every single day.

Rather, he believes it will end in the next 10 years. Every single year. See? There's a difference.

[KacyRay]

As Michael points out, there is a pattern in Kacy's posts that is injurious to good-faith debate, ..... but based entirely out of his own desire to be part of what he calls the "right side of history" alongside his carefully cultivated social-media echo-chamber of progressives, enablers, and revisionist historians.

Way to out yourself, Dan.

What were you saying about good-faith debate?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Read it and weep, from the left:

Glenn Beck is back
by ALEX SEITZ-WALD
April 26, 2013
Salon

From the article:

You thought the conservative broadcaster had been banished to the Siberia that is the Internet since he left Fox News in June of 2011, but thanks to some signature conspiracy theorizing in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, Beck is back, baby. Just look at this Google Trends chart for searches of his name beginning the month after he left Fox:

The conspiracy certainly spiked search on Google, and if anybody knows anything about search engines, that is most impressive, but what about where it counts? $$$

The empire Beck has built outside Dallas is by all accounts going gangbusters and was an impressive operation up close when I visited. The network is reportedly bringing in around $40 million a year, with 300,000 subscribers who pay $10 per month, and more than 9 million unique monthly visitors to TheBlaze.com. And those revenue numbers will likely only grow exponentially if Beck succeeds in his campaign to get wider distribution on cable and satellite providers.

Just like one would expect from a publication like Salon, Seitz-Wald insinuates Glenn gets this kind of money off of one conspiracy theory, not plain hard work over the last couple of years with a solid entrepreneurial vision.

The 40 million a year mentioned needs to be added to another 40 million in equity financing this year, according to the SEC filing, that is coming down the pike (see here). I believe Glenn's using that to expand his radio network.

Well, at least we know he's been relegated to the discount shelf. Now all we need to do is tell Salon. Here's what they think:

The question is: Now that he’s having a mini-resurgence — and sites are remembering the appealing traffic numbers that come with putting Glenn Beck in headlines — are we all going to have to start paying attention to him again for good?

That's one way of saying it, I guess. The problem is that Glenn is not having a resurgence. He never went away. He's just stepping real hard on a callous that threatens Obama's administration for real. And look at what Salon wants to do about it--"sites are remembering the appealing traffic numbers that come with putting Glenn Beck in headlines."

They want their cut.

Michael

[KacyRay]

I know what bothers me about your discourse.

It's the false dichotomy.

Mike,

If I haven’t made it clear yet, I favor smaller government. Taxation only as absolutely necessary, optimum freedom and liberties, government intervention in business affairs only insofar as needed to keep unscrupulous businessmen from harming private citizens, no vice laws, no discrimination laws (for private business owners), reduced (or eliminated) foreign aid, abortion rights, gun rights, everyone-and-everything rights, non-interventionism, no legal favoritism, etc.

It seems that each of those who disagree with me here do so for each their own reasons (with SB and RB being the notable mind-meld). I think your disagreements come from a different place than those of dennis or SB.

I agree – in the false dichotomy of the popular national conversation, true smaller government gets left out. I think that what you might perceive as an *endorsement* of the progressive-liberal big-government faction is actually a *preference* I have for them when faced with the hard-right-wing theocratic revisionist “I spend more time concerned with my dollar than with how the most vulnerable among us are being exploited” faction as the only other politically viable alternative.

And let’s not pretend – that’s the alternative we have had before us for some time now. I’m not saying no other alternatives exist – but none have been viable. I supported Ron Paul during the past 2 elections, and when he became non-viable, I had to choose between Obama and McCain/Romney, did I not? I wound up not voting at all, during either election, but my most vocal hostility was directed at those lying sacks over at Fox News (Hannity, Dick Morris, Doocey, et al), as well as those puppet politicians like Palin, Bachmann and O’Donnell.

Of course, guys like SB and RB (who actually holds the dubious distinction of being the only person I’ve ever flat-out stopped talking to on my FB page due to his entirely disrespectful and dishonest manner, until he finally deleted me, and then tried to get back on – presumably thinking I’m some kind of idiot) see my attacks on those pundits and pretender politicians as an endorsement of socialism and hard-left liberalism, despite how I’ve carefully explained all this to them in the past. When I insist that I would gladly welcome smaller government if it were an option, the response is “Well… no you wouldn’t. After all, you’re a liberal.”

That’s why I disengage.

By the way… Could anyone seriously vote Republican after GW Bush? Seriously? Can anyone really tell me we were better off during those years than we are now? With a straight face?

See, when I bring up the fact of how shitty life was from 2000-2008, and how much better things are now, the rote response I get from SB is “Well, you only think things are better. But you’ll see… in just a short while, we’ll be a fourth-world socialist nightmare.” Of course, he doesn’t come out and just *say* it… but that’s where it always leads.

No, it isn’t. The economic machine isn’t operating at maximum efficiency, that’s very true. But it isn’t about to explode, either. That’s just more fearmongering and alarmism.

I’d love for there to be a viable third party I could support. And I’d love for it to be a small government party. But for someone to suggest that theocrats represent smaller government – that they would rather have someone tell them who they can and can’t have sex with, what they can and cannot ingest, and what countries we will invade, so long as they get a batter tax rate - I can’t take that seriously.

My issues have never been with small government political theory or even with conservatism. My issues have been with the current incarnation of the GOP and the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh propaganda machine. SB/RB do not recognize that distinction. I suspect Dennis doesn't either. I hope you do.

So tell me… who are the viable small-government candidates?