Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:20 am
Bill Maher is calling out Beck, Limbaugh and rest of right wing media machine as con men who only care about, “separating rubes from their money.”
Here is the video:
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After discussing the demise of Sarah Palin, Maher said,
Con men like Rush and Beck are one of the reasons the Republicans are in such dire straits today. Because they don’t care about winning elections. They care about separating rubes from their money. They’ve discovered there’s a fortune to be made by convincing a small portion of America under the illusion that they are always under attack from Mexicans, or ACORN, or Planned Parenthood, or gays, or takers, global warming hoaxers. It doesn’t matter. They don’t want a majority. They want a mailing list. A list of the kind of gullible Honey Boo Boos out there who think that there’s a war on Christmas, and that the socialist policies of our Kenyan president have been so disastrous that the end of our world is coming.
I’m not exaggerating. Go to any right wing website, and you’ll see ads for prepper bags, and water purifiers, and survival seeds, also known as seeds. And for years, Beck, Hannity, and other radio hosts endorsed Goldline. A company that sales gold coins to frightened old people for twice what they’re worth. Why not just hogtie your audience and steal their disability checks? After all, we are talking about people who spend actual money on a children’s book by a fat adulterer and a peroxide blonde from another dimension.
Glenn Beck has only 300,000 subscribers, so they’ll never be a majority, but it doesn’t matter. Maybe they can only vote once every two years, but they can buy the same book every three weeks. The exact same book over, and over, and over again. I don’t know being a Republican means having to have your faith recharged five times a day like Dick Cheney’s heart. Because there’s no comparable industry on the left devoted to separating liberals from their cash, unless you count Whole Foods.
The concepts of perpetual minority status and persecution are what keep the right wing media machine going. It doesn’t matter that the right controls the largest cable news network and dominates talk radio. The genius of Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, etc. is that they have been able to sell themselves as the minority battling a mythic liberal media monolith when the reality is the exact opposite. They are each the top rated network and programs on their platforms.
Maher’s introduction of two contradictory explanations for why these rubes are getting suckered illustrates how the left is still baffled by the mechanics of right wing media. Bill Maher called the people who give the Becks and Limbaughs of the right wing world their money gullible, but he also suggested that they are being guided by a faith in their ideology.
When the behavior of consumers of far right media is examined, they behave more like true believers than gullible souls. They keep tuning in to Fox News, talk radio, and visiting right wing websites because they truly believe that they are in a battle for survival. They are like an end of days cult that has convinced itself that the presidency of Barack Obama is bringing about the demise of not just the republic, but of all society. (This is why they keep talking about their “way of life” being under attack.)
It is this devoted belief that allows them to argue that violent intruders could invade their home at any minute, so they must be allowed to buy as much weaponry as possible.
They really believe, and that is why they keep watching Fox, tuning in to Rush, buying the same redundant books that have been written by conservatives for the last 50, and getting their “news” from right wing websites.
Fox News, Beck, Limbaugh, and rest are tent revival preachers going 21st Century door to door making oodles of money by evangelizing conservatism’s “good word.” The problem is that these right wing political snake oil salesmen are one of the three most influential forces in the Republican Party. These people who have no interest in policy are shaping the policies and attitudes of elected Republicans. The few million people who get separated from their cash aren’t stupid. They are true believers who have been brainwashed by lies and conspiracies in order to be exploited for profit and gain.
Of course, the people who most need to hear Maher’s message have already determined that he is a dirty liberal socialist who is spreading Obama propaganda.
Some people will never learn.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
