Addicted to Outrage

by Glenn Beck

  She asked me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “So, then how do I do this?” I told her, I am not a comedian but an opinion guy who moonlighted at being funny on the side. But if I had to do it all over again, with the knowledge I have now, “I would probably end up mostly doing it the same way I did it the first time.” I told her that as a student of history I hadn’t yet found any examples of anyone in media, comedy, et cetera, who had ever charted a successful course through these waters. But if she ever wanted an understanding ear, I was here.

  A few weeks later, I called her to discuss coming with me to Detroit to do a service project together, with the caveat that our audiences were not allowed to talk politics. We could then end the weekend at some theater and discuss what our audiences learned by working side by side. She was interested but said, “I am not sure how to make that funny.”

  My next suggestion, a few months later, to come with me to Asia or Africa to rescue child slaves, was even harder to make funny. I told her that the “funny” would be her being locked in a plane at forty thousand feet with nothing but ocean underneath for hours. She didn’t take me up on the offer. I would still text her from time to time. She would text back something short but meaningful. But eventually we fell out of contact. The more I would see in clips and stories, the more worried I became for her. She had chosen a course, or perhaps, like me, it was the only one she knew or understood how to work, and it was a path that I felt she would soon regret.

  When she finally called Ivanka the c-word, I cringed. It was her “Obama is a racist” moment. But unlike that moment for me, this was scripted. It was planned and approved in a comedy room and by producers. Somehow, this feminist had gotten to the point of calling another woman a name that even Donald Trump hadn’t used when he described where celebrities could grab women.

  It was degrading and an insult when he referred to that as locker-room talk. But without justifying it at all, it is who he is, and you don’t change when you are successful. You have no motive to change; everything is working. What’s more, everyone around you at that time is incentivized to boost you up, to empower and enable you to go even further. No one around Trump or Bee provided any kind of real pushback. They had both surrounded themselves with like-minded people who had seen the success and so provided no help to the talent or the person, because it was all a part of what made them successful.

  This was her act, and what was she doing that was so different from what others were doing? People had called Sarah Palin that same name, and Trump supporters had printed T-shirts with that word under Hillary Clinton’s face.

  The problem was, Ivanka was likable.

  Political correctness does not have consistent or static rules. It isn’t what you say, it is also about whom you say it to or about, who you are, how much of an impact you are making for “your team,” and which team you are playing for.

  This is antithetical to American justice and thinking. It was the Enlightenment that changed all of this. For as long as men have had rulers meting out justice, there has been man-made injustice. And social justice returns us to the Dark Ages when rulers, the mob, or the powerful try to balance some mythical scale of justice for the collective. So, in many ways, it doesn’t matter if you did it or not; if your tribe is the source of some perceived injustice of the past, you are to be condemned, even if innocent, as it serves to balance the scales.

  We must once again return to reason, and what matters is the integrity of the thought, and not the personality.

  Samantha recently learned the hard way that even a darling of the left isn’t immune from the outrage brigade. She said something grossly out of bounds and was called out for it. But in our day and age, an apology, no matter how sincere, isn’t enough. From the right and left, calls have come for her head and her career on a platter. Even her apology has caused a round of outrage from the militant feminist left, who are outraged she didn’t stand by her demeaning expletive!

  I genuinely believe Samantha Bee is a good, compassionate person. Like all of us, she is navigating very frothy waters, as our Outrage Addiction can be triggered by any slight error or omission that violates the values of one tribe or another.

  Because all of us, on both sides, so firmly believe “our side” is right, we cannot see the mistakes we each make are exactly the same. I haven’t been especially successful at bringing both sides together.

  One truly hopeful sign that has appeared over the last couple of years has been the appearance and popularity of the New Enlightenment movement that has begun to reach younger people on the “Intellectual Dark Web.” Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Jonathan Sacks, and Penn Jillette. The last two names on the list aren’t generally recognized as part of this group, but they should be. These men are not always right—for all I know, they will turn out to be pedophile car thieves—but they are at least actively engaged in rational, civil discussions and are seeking to use reason to find the truth. To me, they set a good example of the right way to engage with readers, colleagues, and opponents online.

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  Divisions

  Sadly, the members of the New Enlightenment are largely unheard across mainstream media’s constant and ongoing rage-fest. In early 2018 Sean Hannity warned that things had gotten so bad that “this country is headed toward a civil war in terms of two sides that are just hating each other,” a battle that would be ignited if prosecutor Robert Mueller went after President Trump. Although later he explained that he wasn’t predicting a real war, he was just pointing out that the “two sides of this are fighting and dividing this country at a level we’ve never seen.” I believe he is wrong. If things don’t change, we will be fighting a real civil war.

  Rocker and NRA board member Ted Nugent went even further, claiming liberals are “rabid coyotes running around. You don’t wait till you see one to go get your gun. Keep your gun handy, and every time you see one, you shoot one.”

  The left has been no better. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton described Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables.” The would-be assassin who attacked a group of Republican members of Congress on a softball field, shooting House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, made certain they were Republicans before opening fire. In 2013, Oprah Winfrey, clad in the impenetrable cloak of the moral outrage afforded by society solely to African Americans, famously stated that she believes the only way for racism to be solved is that “older Americans . . . who were born and bred and marinated . . . in that prejudice and racism . . . just have to die.”

  If you want to investigate this theme further, just do a “Trump supporters are subhuman” search on Twitter or Reddit. You can find thousands and thousands of relevant results, retweets, and upvotes.

  In 1856, a congressman beat a U.S. senator nearly to death on the floor of the Capitol Building. We aren’t that far off from that. When Senator Rand Paul was attacked and badly injured by an irate neighbor with whom he’d had strong political disagreements in the past, social media erupted with an avalanche of taunting, celebratory posts that a firebrand of the right had been attacked and put in his place. Most don’t even talk about the day we almost lost several congressmen at a shooting on a baseball diamond in Virginia in the spring of 2017. The shooter was a Bernie Sanders volunteer who had written much about his hatred of Republicans. He had plotted and planned, and when he arrived at the ballpark, he asked if those were the Republicans on the field. When he was told yes, he moved into position with a rifle. The media covered it, but with not even a fraction of the coverage for a school shooting. Where was the CNN town hall? One can’t help but ask, would the media coverage have been the same had it been Democrats on the field? If it were a Republican Donald Trump volunteer, do you think everyone would now know him, including his middle name? Lee Harvey Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, and Mark David Chapman. I remember the name of the woman who tried to shoot President Ford: Lynette Alice “Squeaky” Fromme. That happened in 1975.
I was eleven. Now, let me ask you, do you remember the would-be mass assassin’s name from the baseball game? Even just the first name? Why is that, do you suppose?

  He is identified as a self-described “left-wing activist,” James Hodgkinson. The Virginia Attorney general, speaking of his act, “concluded it was fueled by rage against Republican legislators and was an act of terrorism.”

  The media claimed it was NOT politically motivated.

  There has been no let-up since then. In June 2018 numerous pundits and politicians, wearing the trappings of outrage, called upon the public to begin a campaign of “protest” that formerly might have been known as bullying. Congresswoman Maxine Waters called followers to a grand “resistance” wherein any Trump administration officials were fair game when it came to forming a mob and confronting them in public to ensure they knew they were not welcome “anywhere.” Several cabinet members have since then been harassed in public, being physically chased out of restaurants or shouted down by mobs in the street. Outraged that Justice Kennedy had dared to announce his retirement during the Trump administration, Michael Moore, apparently eager to demonstrate that Trump Derangement Syndrome is actually a thing, suggested that he and a million people should form a human “wall of flesh” around the Supreme Court building to prevent any Trump nominee from taking a seat on the nation’s highest court. Given the fact this occurred before Trump had even released a short list of potential names to go through the Senate review process, it would seem that insurrection against the U.S. government might be a little extreme.

  Continuing the irrational narratives born of everything-Trump-does-is-pure-evil outrage, Bette Midler went a step further still, claiming, “Every single institution or agency in our government is being dismantled by this administration. Congress, gone; SCOTUS, gone; the executive branch, in the hands of a madman; the FBI, DOE, etc., etc., etc. And you thought it couldn’t happen here.”

  Perhaps Bette misunderstands what fascist dictators do. They build giant government agencies. If you don’t like the dismantling of a giant state, you may not want to march or support those who want to abolish ICE. The real problem here is that there are many people who are not actually on the side they think they are.

  “INCONCEIVABLE” has become today’s “FASCIST.”

  “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

  We can’t go on like this. We can’t. This country will not survive as the world’s great democracy if we don’t learn how to work together again and tell the truth. I know there are some readers who are smiling as they read this and thinking, “Oh, that’s just good old Glenn putting on his catastrophist hat again.” But it isn’t just me saying that, it’s history. Roy Williams, in his groundbreaking marketing book The Pendulum, has traced the history of society back to the time of Christ, and concluded that all empires swing like a “pendulum” every eighty years from a Me generation to a We. He said that he was trying to find out how a society defines what is acceptable and what is not. What he found was remarkable. He writes: “Me” and “we” are the equal-but-opposite attractions that pull society’s pendulum one way, then the other. The twenty-year upswing to the zenith of “We” (1923–1943) is followed by a twenty-year downswing as that “We” cycle loses energy (1943–1963). Society then begins a twenty-year upswing into “Me” (1963–1983), then the downswing (1983–2003). We are currently headed for the zenith of the upswing of “We.” Historically, the place of maximum discord and danger is the apex of the “We” cycle (2023). And then, if we’re lucky or well-managed, the cycle begins again. Neither cycle is good nor bad, but too much of anything isn’t healthy. Strauss and Howe have done complementary work and describe the generations as the Idealist Me and the Civic We.

  Think of the things that we have spent the last ten or twenty years craving. We have been looking for someone who is real, experiences that are authentic. Politicians who will just say it as it is. This is because in the “Me” cycle, the zenith goes too far and creates people and situations that ring hollow, people who are “posers,” phonies. Self-centeredness, guru worship, and depravity. Think Michael Douglas in the original Wall Street. At the other extreme, the height of the “We” cycle, the distortions become self-righteousness, oppressiveness, and obligations to conform to the collective. If you play this cycle back and rewind time, you can see that the big movement of the West (for some reason the East is on the opposite swing) always comes at the zenith of the “We.” The year 1943 was the height of World War II, when almost the entire West was swept up into totalitarianism, fascism, communism, and, even here at home, collectivism/socialism. We had collectivized ourselves under the New Deal and had rounded up Japanese Americans for the good of the collective, even though all studies done at the time told the progressive president that they were no threat. The “We” before that was the American Civil War, which was horrid in its bloodshed but righteous in its cause. But if you look overseas, it was at this same time that Europe had been set on fire in what is called “the Spring of Nations,” a revolution started by Marx and Engels after the publication of The Communist Manifesto.

  If we rewind time again, the next “We” moment produced both the American Revolution and the French Revolution.

  With any real understanding of the impact of this swing, you may begin to grasp how critical it is to find our way back to our principles and each other. If we are rooted in decency and service to a noble cause, we will do great things. If we are just slightly off, we will fall prey to nationalism, fascism, or communism, as Europe did each and every swing to We. It is the We generations that divide, categorize, and exterminate those who are deemed unworthy, dangerous, or out of step with the collective. You can see this everywhere now—even in Sweden, where the people are turning on their own inclusive values and for the first time dividing into an us-versus-them community. Unfortunately, the line between life and death, noble and evil is so thin that it can easily be missed. It certainly will be missed if we are all outraged and in “fight or flight” mode as our reason centers shut down in outrage, anger, and fear.

  In 1926, in a study requested by Joseph Stalin, who wanted reassurance that communism was superior to capitalism, Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev wrote that nations went through economic waves lasting about sixty years. He had studied the life and death cycles of the great empires throughout history and concluded that these waves consisted of roughly a decade of depression, followed by several decades of technological innovation that led to economic prosperity, then another decade of uncertainty. These changes are inevitable, he wrote, and therefore capitalism will crush communism. You must not ignore the natural cycles of man and life.

  As a result of Kondratiev’s work, Stalin had him shot by a firing squad in 1938.

  THE “WE’RE DIFFERENT” DENIAL

  I am sure there are a lot of Americans saying with great confidence that this can’t happen to us. We’re too strong, too powerful. We’re the economic engine of the world. Currencies are based on the fluctuations of our dollar. We have so much technology and access to energy. When America sneezes, Europe and Asia catch a cold. And I’m just as certain that Romans once said the same thing. And the Greeks and the Portuguese and the Spanish.

  Remember when the sun never set on the British empire? Of course, that was followed by what Winston Churchill referred to as its Darkest Hour.

  America took its place as the most powerful country on earth following World War I. That was just about a century ago. We’re at the beginning of the next cycle, and we’re being challenged economically, militarily, and even morally. A great disruption is coming, and if we can’t deal with it together, it will rip us apart. History tells us what happens to those civilizations that fall into these patterns.

  If we can’t even figure out how to have a civil conversation with our neighbors, we certainly aren’t going to be able to determine how to successfully integrate the coming revolution of technologies—supercomputing and
artificial intelligence, for starters—into a functioning society.

  Here’s something to think about: How can we possibly have a serious discussion about weaponizing outer space or preventing another depression when we’re spending so much time arguing about whether the president had sex with a porn star, and whether we should care? How can we teach a machine to police hate speech or teach military drones to respect life when we can’t even agree on the most basic definitions of those words?

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  The Pushers

  Let me just address the media, party players, and politicians on their daily hysteria over what used to be called “childish” behavior.

  Stop with the so-called outrage about the stuff your guy did in the past that never bothered you until the other guy did it. Suddenly, now it’s a crisis in your life and you are going to start a campaign, knit a hat, and hold rallies to stop “the injustice.”

  Stop with outrage that CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, et cetera have lost touch because they can’t stop talking about Trump in negative ways “all the time, every show!” (Remember when I was on Fox?) and the cries: “It is outrageous! CNN is all fake news.” Stop it.

  “No!” says the left. “You don’t even begin to understand OUTRAGEOUS! I just can’t believe how Fox covers for this president. They worship him! He can do no wrong for them! They aren’t a news organization because they refuse to even admit the president has scandals.” Stop it!