Glenn Beck, Enemy of the People

By Bernie Quigley

- for The Hill on 10/25/09

I was once formally forbidden to talk to any student or professor at the college I worked at for helping a few students organize a conference about the killings taking place in Bosnia. When I was seen talking briefly to a student in passing on the campus later I was fired. This at a time when I had three children under the age of eight and my wife, on the farm with the kids, was eight months pregnant with our fourth. I worked then as a temp doing odd jobs including cleaning toilets at a local Sara Lee factory. When we finally sold our beautiful little farm in the hills of North Carolina we had lost $40,000 and were down to our last $25. But it remains the proudest moment of my working life. Writers like to be censored. It puts even the inconsequential in league with the greatest. So I know how Glenn Beck is feeling today; proud and honorable. Everyone at Fox should feel the same.

Glenn Beck has been officially declared the Enemy of the People by Big Brother. His firm, Fox News, has been virtually banned from Presidential press conferences. In an administration now well known for its lack of perspective, this is a sizeable public relations blunder. Last week Beck was just a folksy, funky and entertaining trickster on a second tier TV station. This week he is the government’s officially-sanctioned Enemy of the People. Last week he was just a chump. Now he’s a national hero.

Not since the Keystone Kops arrested screenwriter Dalton Trumbo for peeing in his neighbor’s yard in the big Hollywood Commie Crackdown of the McCarthy era have the federalies staged such a public farce.