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"We are dealing with people who think they should rebel until they get their little kingdom like Satan did," said Beck. "You know what? Thanks, Mr. President, but I think we're going to keep the Internet the way it is right now. You know - or at least until people who are worshipping Satan, you know, aren't in office."
The mechanism by which net neutrality will silence Beck and those like him remains murky, but the matter is clearly of great concern.
"The FCC also says they are marching forward, marching with a boot on your throat to - announcing plans to make Internet companies a public utility," he said. "Net neutrality - the court shot that one down, but they are going to make it a public utility now."
Or again: "So now, the president wants to regulate the Internet, to help control all the misinformation out there. He is going to do it with net neutrality. Well, the court said no... So, now what they're doing is the FCC is just going to - they're going to make it a public utility. The Internet. Where are you, America, without the Internet?"
The entire segment was driven by a recent Obama speech to graduates in which the president described the challenges of "coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kind of content and exposes us to all kind of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter."
(Beck interjected, "Oh no, let's ban that!" when replaying the clip.)
"With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and Playstations - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion," continued Obama.
Obama's particular remark here might sound noncontroversial, but Beck has always claimed to see the secret truth lying beneath the banal words - in this case, that Obama will use the FCC to shut him down.
It's not often that you hear about the inner workings of the FCC on cable news, especially coming from one of TV's most popular talkers. But Beck has mounted a one-man war on the FCC for the last 18 months, and he is determined to keep the "Marxists" from silencing him.
Back in April, Beck railed against net neutrality, saying that "it's about eliminating traditional, constitutional points of view from the public arena. But that's not the way it's being billed. It is about stopping debate. But nobody will tell you that. It's about ending free speech. It is about Marxism."
Julius Genachowski, a former tech executive who worked with startups and media mogul Barry Diller, is pushing unfettered Marxism? The idea is risible, but Beck seems to believe that the FCC has been infiltrated by radical groups who will help to implement Obama's secret censorship agenda. Chief among these groups is Free Press, the nonprofit that pushed the FCC to censure Comcast for its P2P blocking. (Genachowski's press secretary previously worked for the group.)
"The FCC is being inundated by a special interest group ironically named Free Press, whose goal it is to limit America's free press and freedom of speech," said Beck in April. "But you see, Free Press isn't about free speech. It's about Marxism. It's about silencing dissent. Free Press is an oxymoron started by an oxy-Marxist. His name is Robert McChesney. In addition to cofounding Free Press, he's also the former editor of The Monthly Review. This is a self-proclaimed, independent socialist magazine - I don't want to call names - an openly Marxist publication. It sounds like a free press advocate so far, doesn't it?"
McChesney favors much more public financing of media, which he sees as essential to democracy. He also wants the Internet to become "a public utility," which is apparently where Beck got the idea that he now ascribes to the FCC. (The current push to apply a handful of "Title II" rules to the ISP industry has nothing to do with making them into some sort of public utility.)
Beck sees all sorts of enemies to his freedom of speech - net neutrality being only one of many at the FCC. According to Beck, FCC proceedings on "localism" (forcing public spectrum license holders to have local input into programming) and "diversity" (seeking broader representation among spectrum license holders, like TV and radio stations) have the same goal as net neutrality: censorship of conservatives.
The two principles, localism and diversity, combine to form a "new Fairness Doctrine," in the words of a Beck guest from May 2009.
Beck has long agued that the old Fairness Doctrine, which required "equal time" for opposing points of view on contentious issues, will return in some other form to keep down conservative commentators, which have been hugely successful on talk radio and now on Fox News.
"I said a few months ago don't pay any attention to the Fairness Doctrine, they are going to come at this from a different angle entirely. And the angle that I predicted, but you have even more is localism," he told his guest, author Brian Jennings.
Objecting to FCC involvement in network management is a legitimate topic. So is worrying about the effects that neutrality rules might have on investment. But the idea that Obama and Free Press and the FCC will somehow use net neutrality to silence Glenn Beck is simply odd - how would having ISPs treat IP packets more equally affect Beck at all? Even the Christian Coalition supports the FCC on this because it would protect conservative voices.
By handling these issues the way he does, Beck unfortunately makes real debate more difficult - though at least millions of Americans now know something about diversity, localism, and net neutrality. Unfortunately, they also "know" that Obama worships Satan, that the Internet is about to become a "public utility," and that the FCC will shut down conservatives with network neutrality.
And Beck's war against the FCC shows no sign of slowing anytime soon.
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