Why Beck's Bad Novel Is a Must Read

From The Daily Beast here.

It turns out that the beach-read potboiler just might be the perfect medium for Glenn Beck’s patented mix of paranoia, patriotism, conspiracy theories, and self-help philosophy. Liberated from the obligations of literal truth, Beck is free to mix fact and faction into a genre he calls “faction”—appropriate because it is designed to divide the country into “us” against “them,” pitting heroic Beck-ian true believers in a life-or-death struggle against evil elitists and the sheeple who follow them.

The newly released The Overton Window is not just a bad book; it is an instructively bad book because it offers a complete color-by-numbers picture of the contemporary Wingnut psyche. It also answers the question of whether Beck fully appreciates the forces he’s playing with and the audiences he is catering to—the book is essentially a love letter to any group that might have seen themselves as implicated in the Department of Homeland Security’s report about the rise of extremism from the far-right in the age of Obama. . . .