After Targeting Van Jones, Glenn Beck Takes His shot at Hip-Hop Activist Yosi Sergant

Are you mad yet? You should be. Glenn Beck has now taken down Yosi Sergant, the second hip-hop activist to be targeted in the Obama administration in a week.

Last night the 34-year old communications director at the National Endowment For The Arts was asked to resign from his position. (As of press time, it was not clear if Sergant would be remain at the NEA in a lesser role or resign from the agency entirely.)

Why? Because he was trying to organize artists to support President Obama's national service program, United We Serve. If your next question is: so what? That was ours too. But Glenn Beck compared the effort to "Nazi propaganda."

(Just sick -- especially since Sergant, a Jewish American, has worked as an activist for peace in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.)

This was the same logic paleocons used to batter Obama's school speech. If he does it, it's indoctrination. If they do it, it's "journalism." But there's much more to this story…

Coming For Hip-Hop Heads

Sergant was the key organizer in the historic arts effort to back the Obama campaign. In January 2008, Sergant teamed with Shepard Fairey to produce the now iconic HOPE posters (a variation on Fairey's original PROGRESS poster, above and flipped). He began handing out the first 3,000 copies at a rally at UCLA and they stumbled into history.

He then went on to commission literally dozens of artists -- and inspire hundreds more -- to create Obama images -- making the candidate the face of hope, progress, and change. By the end of the summer, Obama was riding the biggest creative surge for any presidential candidate ever.

Earlier this year, at the request of grassroots artists and arts advocates, Sergant helped to organize a White House meeting for them -- I was there -- and he has helped open the doors to artists like Saul Williams, Mayda Del Valle, and graffiti artists like Kofie to the White House. He was appointed to one of the country's most influential positions in culture as the director of communications for the National Endowment for the Arts, the nation's largest funding agency and policy-setting body.

In an interview I did earlier this year with him, he told me he started out in Los Angeles as a self-described "goofy kid trying to get down" in the cipher with the freestyle dancers and trying to get up in the train yards with the graffiti writers. "It's who I am, " he said. "Spray-paint brought me to the NEA and I won't forget that."

He added, "I think we can revolutionize the way that Americans think about art." He wanted to do that in part by continuing to engage artists more directly in working in their communities. He was working to enlist high-profile artists for the United We Serve national service initiative when Beck started attacking him a couple of weeks ago.

Beck said, "Your government is trying to trick you, use your tax dollars to change your mind. It's called propaganda."

You can see all of Beck's stupidity and hypocrisy compiled here.

Why Culture Always Matters

Why was Beck going after a communications director at an arts agency?

Beck's agenda is unveiling itself -- he means to go hard after the progressives in the Obama administration whose work engages grassroots movements and reaches people and communities directly through media and the arts.

This is why he has also been attacking Mark Lloyd, Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer at the FCC, and others like him. Real diversity means that voices like Beck's are in danger of being drowned by the roar of the masses.

Beck is not just trying to make progressives who are young and/or of color absolutely dispensable to the establishment. He is trying to take away their platform as well. To Beck, this is a fight not just over the individuals, but to block the ways change is actually made.