THE DUST BETWEEN GLENN BECK'S EARS

It may have escaped your notice, but last September, there was a bit of a folderol in some social media circles after Glenn Beck - the weepy CNN FOXNEWS "self-facilitating media node" took to the airwaves his website to wax conspiratorial about a sinister plot involving nihilists, "progressives", eugenics, NPR, Global Warmers, the Nazis, the New School, the federal government, New Yorkers, the fashion industry, obscure philosophy professors, Jay-Z and Beyonce, True Detective, and Matthew McConnaughey. You can watch the embedded video above to see for yourself that I'm not exaggerating, and this excellent essay by Critical-Theory.com’s Eugene Wolters covers all the important factual points - and catalogs most of Beck's crimes against reason - very well, indeed.

Basically, Beck has less than nothing to say about the substance of what philosopher/author Eugene Thacker tries to communicate in his book, In The Dust of This Planet... which is kind of bizarre when you consider that's the ostensible topic of this entire video segment. I would frankly be shocked if Beck had even reached out to Thacker for comment. 

Instead,  what we're presented with is yet another example of Beck's trademark "pinball logic". He literally winds himself up, then goes skimming across the surface of things, making annoying noises every time he collides with a familiar name or concept. "Nihilism!" DING! "Progressives!" DING! "Eugenics!" DING! "Jay-Z thinks he's so cool!" DING-DING-DING!!! 

Never mind that there are no conceivable connections between the facts that he's juggling, beyond their close proximity in Beck's tightly-packed frontal lobe. So long as he delivers his spiel with the kind of eerie foreboding and fake, wounded dignity we've come to expect from him, the message is going to resonate with a growing segment of the population that I'm calling New Wave Paranoids. You know, the kind of "independent thinkers" who instantly believe every major news story is either a "false flag event", or a "psy-op", or "predictive programming". They're the ones who go around telling everyone to "wake up", when the tragic fact of the matter is that they're the woolliest sheeple of them all.

Anyway, it should come as no surprise that Beck entirely misses Thacker's point. In The Dust of This Planet isn't describing some future dystopian nightmare world, but the world AS IT IS TODAY. Beck likes to sell the fantastic lie that you and I are living in some sort of comfy, cozy American Dream... when the truth is we're living in a slaughterhouse built on the twin pillars of mass genocide and slavery, and fueled by the ongoing enslavement, impoverishment and starvation of nearly half the fucking planet. 

When considered in this light, the idea that Beck could level charges of nihilistic conspiracy against the likes of Thacker is among the blackest of ironies.