Adrian Chen | Gawker
Glenn Beck has been railing against 78-year-old CUNY professor Frances Fox Piven for weeks now, claiming she co-authored a devious plan to overthrow the government in the 1960s. Now, some of his fans are issuing death threats against her.
According to the New York Times, Piven has been receiving death threats after being villainized on Beck’s show. “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 rounds ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back,” wrote one user on Beck’s news site, The Blaze.
As a scholar, Piven is famous for her work on social movements. But Glenn Beck has become obsessed with one 1966 essay she and her husband wrote for The Nation, which argued for bringing about social change by overwhelming the welfare system. To Beck, the “Cloward & Piven Strategy” is sort of master plan by Liberals and the Obama administration to collapse the government–he even put her on his “nine most dangerous people in the world” list!
So, inevitably, the crazies started targeting Piven, whose work poses an enormous threat to American undergraduates trying to stay awake in intro sociology, and that’s about it. Seems they think they can somehow prevent her from writing an article in a political journal in 1966 that maybe thirteen people outside of Glenn Beck fans have thought about since then? But it’s a testament both to Glenn Beck’s skill at making shit up, and his fans’ ability to be crazy, that some Americans actually care enough about a sociology professor to threaten her.
[Image by Zachary Roberts via Flickr]
The original version of the story appears here: http://gawker.com/5740701/glenn-becks-ranting-sparks-death-threats-against-78+year+old-sociologist
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