When Does Free Speech Become Hate Speech?

When can you, as an television executive, tell a television personality, "No, seriously. STFU. You're endangering lives and we don't want this kind of heat on us"? You'd think that Fox News - part of a multinational media superconglomerate - would play a little more conservatively around this guy. After all, he doesn't have any real advertisers anymore (of course he got angry about that and took it out on Van Jones. Who, according to him, is some sort of communist child molester or something).



But I wonder what would happen if we did the same thing with him? If we took his words out of context and then inflamed them with some secret code-language to say that the things that he is really saying are not what he is saying, but that he's alluding to something quite sinister and dire. He has an atomic bomb in his pants, and when he takes a dump, our water supplies will become radioactive. We will all become mutated zombies, ready to fight for his Emperor Hitler Zorg.

photo © 2010 stef niKo | more info (via: Wylio)

Achtung! Babies!

But would it really matter? Not that his detractors don't have a propensity for being gullible or prone to violence. But will it illustrate anything other than what his followers believe all along: Beck is God.

Post-note:
I'm thinking we need to catalog what people like Beck are saying and what effect it is having in the real world. REal neat-like. Charts and graphs and pictures and numbers and lines and all that presentable presenting stuff.

And then we need to present that to News Inc's stockholders.

Somebody give me a chalkboard.

Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer's REAL Master Plan

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South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer may sound like a despicable fool here. He may sound like someone who thinks less of the impoverished people in his state than he does of stray cats and dogs. It may sound like his pro-life credentials are in deep jeopardy, considering the massive euthanasia-by-starvation he suggests here.

But if you believe that, then you've just been had by the most brilliant satirist this side of Jonathan Swift. In under three minutes, he's out-performed Stephen Colbert's entire career. Jon Stewart is crying in his latkes.

But so far, very few people are on to him. Sure, he may gain popular support in the Bible belt, where many of his constituents are poor themselves but too proud to admit it. They do not believe that he is talking about them, but about those OTHER lazy, shiftless people that have to rely on government aid and are keeping them from their millions.

You see, Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer is smart enough to understand that government aid to the very poor only amounts to a drop in the ocean of the federal and state budgets. He also understands that it is degrading to be forced to take a drug test, and further that taking away the free lunches of any parents that did fail to pass a drug test is only hurting the already-hurt and neglected children, not the already neglectful said parent. The whole endless cycle of poverty thing to the next generation. He understands that the hungry have low test scores partially because they are hungry and many only get any actual meals only at school, because their families can't afford to work AND live.

LG Bauer is delicately laying down a trap. He's merely got the ultra-conservatives right where they are most vulnerable, their naked contempt for Others, even if those Others are themselves.

I mean, he's not a cold, hard-hearted, stone-dumb idiot monster. Amirite?

Watch for the whammy next. He will go on record as to wanting to starve fat corporations of their government welfare. And then he'll hit the middle class with their tax breaks. Lastly, he'll hit the so-called "Moral Majority" for being so hypocritical, so willing to kill living people while seemingly advocating the rights of the unborn (but of course Mr. Bauer knows that it's a double-edged sword to usher in every fetus as being made in God's image and fully human while denying those same rights of children and adults).

It will be then that those who have rallied behind him - the Tea Party faithful, the Ayn Rand worshipers, the Ditto-heads, the White Aryans, the Birthers, the John Birch Society, the Free Marketians - will look around all starry-eyed at this cloudy and increasingly dim world and ask, "Now what? What can be done now? Our world is turned upside down. We have no faith left."

And this is when Lieutenant Governor and Future Savior of the Republic Andre Bauer will lay out a bold, grand, and lovely new schema: Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the imprisoned and the infirmed, welcome the stranger, pray for justice and mercy. Whoever wants to lead must serve, whoever wants to follow must be innocent like a child.

And he will lead by example.