Jeffrey Feldman /Huffington Post invites your mockery (Glenn Beck, FEMA camps)

Over at Huffington Post, someone named Jeffrey Feldman offers the hilarious 'Glenn Beck Recycles "X-Files" Plot to Spread Fear of Obama' (huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/glenn-beck-recycles-x-fil_b_175068.html). Let's not all laugh at once but ration it out over time:

FOX News personality, Glenn Beck, has been using his airtime to broadcast a right-wing conspiracy theory about the Obama administration setting up 'concentration camps,'part of a secret plot to establish totalitarian rule... Beck's conspiracy theory appears to be lifted directly from FOX Searchlight's 1998 movie The X-Files. In the film, a character named Alvin Kurtzweil (Martin Landau), warns FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) about plans by FEMA to manufacture a federal emergency as a pretext for extending martial law, mass imprisonment, and totalitarian rule, thereby allowing a group of interplanetary aliens to take over the world.

The first difference is, of course, that Beck isn't discussing aliens. And, concerns over what FEMA could do in the case of an emergency - manufactured or otherwise - go back even before Feldman's greatly limited experience. See, for instance, "Oliver North Questioned - Rex 84 Exposed During Iran Contra" (link). Doing a search will reveal a wealth of other information that goes back well before the movie and that doesn't just come from the right. One doesn't have to be an old fogey or even have had any knowledge of talk about FEMA camps to do even a basic search.

Sun, 03/15/2009 - 11:49 · · Importance: 2