"Have you seen the review of the Eye of Moloch in the Guardian?" Glenn asked Pat and Stu this morning during the radio show.
Yes, that's right, The Guardian published a "review" of Glenn's latest thriller the Eye of Moloch — the sequel to best selling novel The Overton Window. The review titled, "A liberal confession: I actually enjoyed Glenn Beck's latest book,"
Detailing Glenn's current professional track, The Guardian writes,
"He is only on the radio for three hours a day, but his nascent cable network, The Blaze, produces 43 hours of original programming a week – all of it filtered through Beck's idiosyncratic paranoid-libertarian outlook."
That's not the last time the writer uses that word: "paranoid."
"Forget comparisons of Beck to Rush Limbaugh. It's more apt to say that Beck is like Fox News' president, Roger Ailes. In fact, that Beck oversees a network in addition to a curated home-shopping website means we should probably be comparing him to Oprah. She might market aspirationally: "buy these things so you can live a beautiful life," but Beck's marketing (of "sun ovens", food insurance, and canning implements) is more direct: "buy these things so that you can live."Beck's paranoid style is familiar to outsiders to the point of parody: the blackboard, the possibly-for-show glasses, the garbled code words,hidden symbols and copious tears. I wonder if it was his growth as a reliable punchline that prompted him to move from Fox to a more insular platform. Since you have to subscribe to The Blaze to watch his meltdowns and lectures and meltdown-lectures, there's less chance that someone who disagrees will stumble upon the madness and expose it. Conspiracy theories thrive in closed systems."
Ironic that the paper that gave Snowden a public microphone would be so quick to call someone paranoid about government overreach, but she doesn't stop there.
"And so she goes on to say that it [Moloch] really makes sense," Glenn explains. "She said,'I did laugh out loud when he described how a government run by progressive goons would throw up roadblocks to free speech on the Internet by starting pointless flame wars. In the bowels of a detention center, former agitators are put to use.'Okay. She goes on. She said, I read that and 'now that I think about it, it all makes sense.' So she goes on and on and on discrediting me as saying at the same time this makes sense and you have to see what he's saying here," Glenn continues.
"But she keeps calling me paranoid. And the reason why she's calling me paranoid on this is because we are being monitored and we are being listened to and we have government progressives that are doing nefarious things. And I couldn't help but read this and realize — and wonder when it will dawn on her that it was her newspaper that broke the Snowden story. So as they mock me for saying the government is doing these things that they are reporting."
If you were watching Glenn on TV or listening on radio the week that his book came out, he noted how unbelievable it was that the Snowden story broke at the same time because of the similarities in the Moloch storyline. Yet despite the fact that The Guardian broke the Snowden story AND she admits the premise of the book is reasonable, she labels Glenn as "paranoid" for putting it out there.
"It's incredible," Glenn noted. "The minds of people have been so closed and that's I think the secret to life. The secret to life is to never close your mind, to always be willing to listen to the other side, to always be willing to listen to somebody who has a differing point of view and say, now wait a minute, explain this to me again before I dismiss you as a total kook. What is your evidence here? What is it that you're saying? You have the guys from the Tides Foundation saying this isn't a Trojan horse. What does that mean is this who is that guy? Well, who was he talking to? Okay, you have a couple of the senators saying the same thing and they're connected how you? They are connected to the Tides Foundation how? You have this from the president. Why has he changed his point of view? It's so easy, unless you have a closed mind. And everybody who says that you're closed‑minded, I want you to ask yourself, has the opinion of this nation changed in the last eight years? Has your opinion of what's really going on, of what the Republicans really are ‑‑ forget about the Democrats. What the Republicans really are. In the last eight or ten years, has your opinion of George W. Bush changed at all? Why? Is it because the press? Or is it because you did your homework and you realized, "Wait a minute. I was wrong on a few things. How is your opinion of the war? Is it because of the press? Is it because of propaganda? Is it because it made you popular, or is it because you've done your homework?"
Glenn continued, "See, I contend we're the ones with the really open mind because we're the ones who have changed. We're the ones who have changed. They haven't noticed it, but we're the ones who have said, "Wait a minute. Our side was wrong. Our side was big‑time wrong for a long time and what are you doing? You're just ‑‑ you're getting your news from the movies. We're actually challenging ourselves and reading and learning, and learning history and then putting things together. And you can call us conspiracy freaks all you want, but I got news for ya: You're the closed‑minded one because without any facts, you make judgments. We require facts before we make our judgment. And then when we put those facts together, you may disagree with them, but you won't even listen to our side. Where we're forced to listen to yours."
