Arianna Huffington claims that Jon Stewart is not a liberal, but simply someone who speaks truth to power.  I disagree.  If Jon Stewart told Arianna Stassinopoulos that she is an unprincipled fag hag who has slept her way up the social ladder so she can be praised for telling us the same lies everyone else in the media does, then that would be truth to power.  Nor would such language be uncalled for to describe self-appointed intellectuals who think of gay sex acts when someone references the Boston Tea Party.  The Huffington/Stewart love fest is power praising power, liberals congratulating each other on their nonexistent courage, and the ruling class uniting to mock the great unwashed who pay their salaries.

Politics is about who, not what, and increasingly rallies have become exercises in identity politics rather than mobilization for specific issues.  Most liberal commentators are interpreting the Tea Party movement as a manifestation of white racial consciousness, with Whites supposedly outraged at a Black president ruling “their” country. The fact that the rallies are overwhelmingly White (with most minorities relegated to the speaker’s duties) is taken as evidence enough that the Tea Party is composed of closet Klansmen.  As Keith Olbermann tediously speechified,

Let me ask all of you who attend these things, how many black faces do you see at these events?’ and ‘Why are you surrounded by largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you?

Of course, this could be said not just of your average Tea Party rally or Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally, but Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.  Both are powerful examples of implicit Whiteness, though neither heralds any kind of burgeoning White racial consciousness.  The Tea Parties are more interested in highlighting the black Founding Fathers that racist progressives have covered up, whereas Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” is essentially an effort by SWPL’s to mock a straw man they’ve created to describe religious conservatives. After all, Keith Olbermann tells us that those primitives don’t believe in evolution but also believe in the existence of racial differences, unlike progressives who understand modern science.

In case you missed it, Comedy Central’s John Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted their “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally this weekend on Washington’s National Mall. The straight man in the act was Stewart (“sanity”), an open liberal concerned about extremism; the funny man was Stephen Colbert (“fear”), who appeared “in character” as an extremist conservative. Such an arrangement is all you need to know about what Comedy Central thinks of traditional Euro-Americans.

Though before I start bashing the rally, I’d be remiss in not pointing out that Stewart and his writers have no small amount of talent and mettle. Throughout the 9/11 years (2001-2006), the tragedy and farce of “movement conservatism,” I found myself agreeing with most of the Daily Show clips I came across in which Stewart would criticize the pompous “democracy spreaders” and their beloved “Decidor.” Certainly, no one else on mainstream cable was willing to report on then-candidate Barack Obama’s kowtow to AIPAC using a New York “Jewy” voice, as Stewart did in a now legendary segment, “Indecision 5768.”

But that was then -- in 2007, an “extremist” conservative was in the White House and Barack Obama was a plucky underdog -- and this is now -- Democrats run the country and grassroots conservatism has taken up the mantle of social protest. Stewart’s message has thus modulated to lampooning those who are anti-Establishment and offering the soothing counsel of take it easy, trust in your elected leaders, don’t question the system, in less subtle words, OBEY!

... repackaging it for the GOP.

Larry Auster articulates the consciousness of the Whites who attended Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally so well that I've momentarily forgotten all the bad things he's said about me.

Buddy in Atlanta writes:

You wrote:

"Commenters who think that there is some implied racial conservatism in the Beck followers that has the potential of emerging are, I fear, kidding themselves."

The attendees at Beck's rally were eager to show their non-racist bona fides, as in this picture:

And these efforts win them no points with leftists. The liberals at Pandagon, where I found this photo, are tearing these guys apart for being racist--who but a racist would carry around a sign asking "Do We Look Racist?"

L[arry]A[uster] replies:

That is one of the most pathetic sights I've seen. But how can we blame them? The whole society, or at least the right half of the society, sends out the message that this is the way for whites to behave. George W. Bush would literally say, "How can I be a racist, since Condi, my National Security Advisor / Secretary of State, is black?", while Condi, as clueless, tone-deaf, and lacking in taste as her boss, participated in the idiocy. And in addition to being pathetic and weak from a conservative point of view, these eagerly non-racist whites, whether Bush or the white men in the photo, don't see how offensive it is from a liberal or just a human point of view---how condescending it is to use a black person as a prop to demonstrate one's own virtue. So these whites degrade both their own dignity and that of the black people whom they treat as badges, while the blacks who willingly join in the charade, whether Condoleezza Rice or the black man in the photo, are blind or indifferent to how they are degrading their own dignity. That's what right-liberalism does to people--it takes away their humanity and makes them see themselves as symbolic abstractions.

It seems that James Edwards and most others have missed the best part of Glenn Beck’s MLK rally.  Those who watch the Glenn Beck Show will have noticed that one of his favorite regulars is Alveda King, the civil rights leader’s niece.  Here is ABC News on her appearance last Saturday.

On the 47th anniversary of her uncle's historic "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, politician and activist Alveda King has joined conservative commentator Glenn Beck at the same spot to bring people together in paying tribute to America's soldiers and "restoring honor" to America...

While speaking in front of tens of thousands today in DC, King said that she hopes that white privilege will become human privilege and that America will soon repent of the sin of racism and return itself to honor.

King also mentioned “white privilege”, and even claimed to have invented the term, in a 2005 interview with Newsweek.

William Saletan at Slate sees the Beck rally as the final conservative surrender to multi-cultural orthodoxy.

Did these portrayals whitewash the sins against which King campaigned? No. In fact, the rally was full of apologies. "It was you, Lord God, who called us to account when we broke the treaties with the first peoples," the Rev. Paul Jehle confessed in the opening prayer. "You called us to repentance. And you, O God, called us to repentance when we did not live up to our creed, and we did not treat everyone as equal." Palin followed Jehle to the podium, calling slavery "our greatest shame." Beck told the crowd, "Let's be honest: If you look at history, America has been both terribly good and terribly bad." He conceded: "Countries make mistakes. We have made more than our fair share." A video reviewed the ugly era of segregation and concluded that King "awoke our nation's collective consciousness." Awoke our consciousness! That's a line straight out of the 1960s...

The rally organizers didn't pretend that all our sins were behind us. "We as citizens must all carry Martin Luther King's dream in all of our hearts today," said the rally video. "The dream is not completed. It's an ongoing struggle, one that all Americans should always be willing to undertake." Borrowing a favorite progressive buzzword, the video affirmed King's recognition in 1963 that "this was the day to inspire change."..

Christianity helps. Its message of repentance helps people admit their mistakes, inviting them to surrender to God rather than to their political enemies. But pride is still hard to swallow. Conservatives need a way to distinguish their apologies from the apologies of progressives. Hence their contrast between looking forward and "wallowing.”..

Crying "socialism" is what conservatives do before they yield to change. It's a stage in the process of defeat. But the process doesn't end with defeat. It ends with absorption. It ends with the political descendants of George Wallace embracing the legacy of Martin Luther King. Beck today is just catching up to where King was 50 years ago. That's because King was in the front of the civil rights bus, and Beck is in the back. And it's a really slow bus. 

Let’s not pretend that the Fox host “had to” do all this in order to remain on TV.  I understand that politics is a game of inches, but you hope for people that move you towards your goal, not away from it.  There are plenty of constitutional, legal and moral arguments against affirmative action, enforced diversity and third world immigration which don’t brush up against white nationalism which Beck could use.  Instead, whether for career reasons, out of personal conviction or both, he's chosen to take white self-flagellation to a completely unheard of level.  One can only pity those regular Americans who thought they may have found a spokesman; I can’t help but believe that all but the dimmest of bulbs are going to start tuning this huckster out.

We've had some back and forths on Glenn Beck, but stories like this give him a soft spot in my heart.

WASHINGTON — A fuzzy video of an Agriculture Department official opened a new front Tuesday in the ongoing war between the left and right over which side is at fault for stoking persistent forces of racism in politics.

Shirley Sherrod, appointed last July to be the USDA's Georgia state director of rural development, was forced to resign after a video surfaced of her March 27 appearance at an NAACP banquet. In a speech, she described an episode in which, while working at a nonprofit 24 years ago, she did not help a white farmer as much as she could have.

Instead, she said, she sent him to one of "his own kind."

The video was posted Monday on the website of conservative activist Andrew Breitbart as a counterattack on the NAACP, which passed a resolution last week accusing the "tea party" movement of having "racist elements."

But for some on the right, Sherrod's comments also reinforced a larger, more sinister narrative: that the administration of the first black man to occupy the White House practices racism in reverse.

The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments, particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers, was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign.

Both Vilsack and an official at the Obama White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone.

Vilsack said early today that the USDA will reconsider the ousting of Sherrod and will "conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts."

In Sherrod's account, her firing had been driven more by the exigencies of the news cycle — and the administration's fear of conservative wrath. She said she was "harassed" to quit by USDA Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her to "do it, because you're going to be on 'Glenn Beck' tonight."

Sherrod added, "The administration was not interested in hearing the truth."

What this story shows is that the Obama Administration is absolutely scared to death of anything that can be perceived as anti-white racism.  It's a battle they don't want to fight anywhere or under any circumstances.  And they're also afraid of Glenn Beck.  If he forces the White House to spend an extra two hours each day watching his show and worrying about its image, giving it less time to think of new "civil rights violators" to go after or work on amnesty, he's doing an invaluable service to this country.

Today, after Glenn Beck told the administration that her comments put her right into the Democratic mainstream, the USDA is considering bringing Sherrod back. 

Richard Hoste seems to differ from my view that the Right (used, of course, in a very broad sense) could in no way benefit from misrepresenting MLK as a small-government conservative. Richard believes that if we continue to tell blacks the noble lie, which the neoconservatives and Glenn Beck have worked so hard to spread, we may be able to neutralize all the race-hustling black leaders.

There are at least three problems with this argument that come readily to mind. One, the lie is so transparent that until now only movement conservatives have bought it; and in this case we are dealing with people who are so incredibly gullible or so thoroughly bribed that they’ll say anything they’re told to say by those who move their strings. I myself have never met a movement conservative or GOP hack who actually thought that King was a “conservative theologian” or an exponent of Thomistic natural law. Rather I’ve encountered dolts who read NR or Weekly Standard and who have told me “we should say this because that’s what we have to say.” Of course the same humanoids have proclaimed Joe Lieberman to be a conservative “because he’s good on the war.”

Two, nobody, including blacks, could possibly believe the crass lie that Richard wishes to see propagated. There is overwhelming evidence, plus media treatment of King’s life and influence, that would keep anybody with even room temperature intelligence (which may exclude most movement conservatives) from buying the proffered snake oil. Watching Beck go nuts (that is more nuts than he usually seems) because a black celebrity described King as a socialist, I had the definite feeling of being on Mars. Does anyone on this planet with even a grade school education not know that King was a left-leaning socialist, who favored special rights for his race? One can quote until the cows come home that banal line about judging people by “the content of their character.” But this does not change the rest of King’s politics, which are an open book, even for blacks.

Three, the cult of King is intertwined with a political purpose, from which it cannot be dislodged. It is a replacement theology for a now mostly moribund Christianity, which incorporates certain older religious themes but places them in a multicultural context. King is the suffering Redeemer, whose birthday comes a few weeks after the traditional date for celebrating the Christian Redeemer; and his death was expiatory, like that of Christ, although, unlike Christ’s kingdom, that of the black socialist savior is situated in this world. King’s mission began the process of cleansing white America of its original sin of racism. But this redemption did not work all at once when he died. Further sacrifice is demanded of the sinner in the form of the demands that the fallen Redeemer laid upon us, that is, more socialism, more set-asides, more rites of atonement, etc. To try to change this powerful symbolism by reconstructing King into something he clearly was not, perhaps a precursor of Glenn Beck or David Horowitz, is a fool’s errand. King was exactly what he was. That he has become the replacement Deity in a post-Christian public theology may strike some of us as laughable. But that elevation is connected to what he said and did. The cult of MLK reflects a certain reality, while Richard’s counter-narrative builds on nothing more than a neocon lie.

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

As I was turning on TV earlier in the week (my wife keeps the set permanently on FOX), I heard Glenn Beck complaining about the Black Panthers. Viewers were then shown a picture of a presumed Klansman in a truck carrying a noose. Supposedly this is what the Black Panthers were planning to do, by looking tough in the presence of approaching voters near a polling station in Philadelphia. Beck then began screaming about how we were ceasing to judge people by “the content of their character,” a reference to the government’s failure to take action against the Panthers’ interference with voting procedures. For the next five minutes Beck dwelled on the idea that “Dr. King gave his life to prevent this from happening.” Indeed King, who had spent his life bearing witness to the truth, would be truly upset to see “how we’ve blown his legacy.”

Three observations are in order here. One, there is nothing in what the Panthers were doing that looked as they were planning a lynching. It’s not even clear that the white guy shown earlier was about to engage in the same quaint custom. Two, I couldn’t imagine that the real MLK would have been entirely unhappy with what Beck disapproved of. King favored all kinds of favors and set asides for his race and would undoubtedly have been delighted with a lopsided black voting majority in Philadelphia or anywhere else that brought his soulmates to power.

An isolated phrase from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech admittedly reveals very little about the speaker’s leftist politics, but perhaps Beck could bestir himself to notice what else King said and wrote. Perhaps Beck could even be induced to stop quoting that magic line that he uses in his monologues once he discovers more about King. But then perhaps he shouldn’t. If he keeps on long enough with his drippy routine while inventing new black founding fathers, he may achieve a victory of sorts, by lifting the GOP’s share of the black vote from 2 to 2.1 percent. But I certainly won’t listen to him as he engages in this Herculean task.

Richard Spencer’s discussion of the neoconservative gestalt popping out of Glenn Beck’s program puts a number of things in perspective. For several years now I’ve been hearing Beck’s tirades courtesy of my wife, who tunes in on his attacks on the Obama administration. While listening to Beck in recent months, while trying to work on the internet, I found myself heartily agreeing with his characterization of Woodrow Wilson as “undoubtedly our worst president.” I also thought that the briefs Beck presented against Wilson and FDR as the creators of morphing managerial states and as bellicose inciters of hate against “undemocratic” minorities showed some independent judgment. In fact I began to wonder how a network as thoroughly controlled as FOX by neocon money and GOP influence could allow this alcoholic-turned-Mormon to go on railing against their authorized heroes. Surely Kristol, Krauthammer, Barnes, O’Reilly, Hannity, etc. could not agree with what he was saying, beyond his ritualistic invectives against Democratic spending habits!

But Richard explains quite convincingly how Beck is on the same page with his sponsors. It is not by accident that he brings on to his program almost exclusively neoconservative guests, like the pseudo-historian and passionate advocate of anti-discrimination legislation, Jonah Goldberg. Beck’s neoconservative pals provide the proper context for his remarks, which are typically aimed at safe targets. These include spendthrift Democrats and long-dead Progressives, who supposedly paved the way for the current Democratic administration.