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Ann Althouse and the paranoid style

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One big problem in America today is that people like Glenn Beck are spouting a lot of bizarre conspiratorial paranoid nonsense in “respectable” high-profile media settings, because their employers have found that encouraging crazy people to regale millions of Americans with pernicious lunacy on a daily basis is quite profitable. I wish it wasn’t necessary to point out that this is an undesirable state of affairs. I also wish it wasn’t necessary to point out that pointing out this is an undesirable state of affairs is not an attack on “free speech” in any useful sense of that term.

Still, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride:

Remember when lefties were all about free speech? When did that change? Why did that change? Perhaps the answer is: Free speech was only ever a means to an end. When they got their free speech, made their arguments, and failed to win over the American people, and when in fact the speech from their opponents seemed too successful, they switched to the repression of speech, because the end was never freedom.

This is Professor Althouse’s response to Robert Wright’s suggestion that on the whole it’s a bad thing that Fox News provides Glenn Beck with a multi-million viewer nightly platform, given that he uses it to say lots of certifiably crazy stuff in the guise of “political analysis.”

Now of course phrasing the matter in this way only proves that I am a clueless member of The Left, who has failed to appreciate that, in the literal sense, Fox didn’t “give” Beck his enormous audience: Fox merely facilitated Beck’s extremely successful (from a financial point of view) campaign to transform himself into one of America’s most popular demagogues. Yes indeed: Beck’s career represents a remarkable triumph — both for himself and for Rupert Murdoch’s fabulously profitable brand of gutter journalism — within what the ingenuous Professor Althouse calls “the marketplace of ideas.” That this is the case might give one pause about the value of that metaphor, and the possible failures of that “market.”

In America today, paranoia runs deep — and it seems to be contagious. The quote above is a classic representation of the paranoid style. Consider the identities of Althouse’s crypto-Stalinist bogeymen of the moment: Robert Wright and Scott Lemieux! Again, is it really necessary to point out that someone who claims that, in America today, people like Wright and Lemieux are at the center of a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to crush political dissent via the “censorship” of Glenn Beck has lost all sense of perspective?

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