![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_archfiendLast - and certainly least - it seems that Weepy's tirades are bearing the usual rotten fruit:
Glenn Beck must have thought he had an easy mark when he targeted Frances Fox Piven. Let’s face it. On paper she’s a female widowed lefty academic now approaching eighty. Most of her life’s work has been focused on enfranchising the poor through welfare reform and voter registration. Surely Beck thought that nearly fifty broadcasts worth of inflammatory disinformation and hate-mongering about Piven and their inevitable result—hate mail, comments and phone calls that range from brutally nasty and paranoid to those that cross the line into the genuine death threat category—would shut her up.
But Beck was wrong. Yes, Piven finally called the New York State troopers last Friday, but that was only after a fresh wave of death threats. And some of her friends are reaching out to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the FBI to see if there’s anything they can do. (After all, those e-mailed death threats may be anonymous, but ISPs can be traced.) But she’s not shutting up or going away. And she sees right through Beck and his ilk.
Keep in mind that none of these threats should automatically be considered "harmless": if that were the case, we're now living in an alternative universe where Byron Williams didn't go on his merry little way to shoot up the Tides Foundation and Frank Rich found no evidence at all of the batshit crazy behavior he details in his column from October 16th of last year.
Yeah, you can hope that we live in an alternative universe where 78-year-old academics aren't receiving death threats. Unfortunately, we live in this one.
Glenn Beck must have thought he had an easy mark when he targeted Frances Fox Piven. Let’s face it. On paper she’s a female widowed lefty academic now approaching eighty. Most of her life’s work has been focused on enfranchising the poor through welfare reform and voter registration. Surely Beck thought that nearly fifty broadcasts worth of inflammatory disinformation and hate-mongering about Piven and their inevitable result—hate mail, comments and phone calls that range from brutally nasty and paranoid to those that cross the line into the genuine death threat category—would shut her up.
But Beck was wrong. Yes, Piven finally called the New York State troopers last Friday, but that was only after a fresh wave of death threats. And some of her friends are reaching out to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the FBI to see if there’s anything they can do. (After all, those e-mailed death threats may be anonymous, but ISPs can be traced.) But she’s not shutting up or going away. And she sees right through Beck and his ilk.
Keep in mind that none of these threats should automatically be considered "harmless": if that were the case, we're now living in an alternative universe where Byron Williams didn't go on his merry little way to shoot up the Tides Foundation and Frank Rich found no evidence at all of the batshit crazy behavior he details in his column from October 16th of last year.
Yeah, you can hope that we live in an alternative universe where 78-year-old academics aren't receiving death threats. Unfortunately, we live in this one.
