Francis Fox Piven appeared on MSNBC Monday evening to discuss the far-fetching theory that Glenn Beck is putting Piven in harm’s way just by mentioning her name on his television program. In an interview with MSNBC fill-in host Cenk Uygur, Piven said that when she first heard of “The Glenn Beck Phenomenon” she laughed and thought it was funny. However, now she feels that Glenn just mentioning her own opinions on the air to be “really insidious” and “really scary.”

“The Glenn Beck phenomenon, when I first realized what was going on, what he was doing – he’s featured me for about two years I thought it was funny at the beginning,” Piven told Uygur on Monday night, “And gradually over time I’ve come to see it as something really important. Really insidious, really scary that’s going on in the political forums of the country. A lot of people are listening to Glenn Beck and they are listening to these very strange and paranoid stories about why things are changing in this country – why things are going wrong for them.”

What are these ‘strange and paranoid’ stories that Piven is referring to? Glenn frequently references a 1966 article written by Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward in The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” In the article they argued one possible way to force politicians to pass a guaranteed national income was to overwhelm the welfare system with new enrollments. They felt that if the politicians were forced to replace the clogged welfare system with a national income this would have ended poverty.

Over the weekend The New York Times found a couple anonymous comments posted on Glenn Beck’s website, The Blaze, that seem to insinuate violence against Piven. One read, “Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas[sic] ready and I’ll give My life to take Our freedom back.”

Of course, the irony being that Piven herself believes violence has a place in one’s political strategy. In 2004 while speaking at the University of Wisconsin Piven said while she had great respect for non-violence she thinks violence is acceptable if it’s part of the revolutionary blueprint. “Unless you have a good reason for breaking the window, probably you shouldn’t do that. Unless it’s you know, a big part of your strategy.”(Video here)

Later in the interview with Uygur, Piven acknowledged that her most recent article in The Nation might be the cause of outrage from those on the right.  “I think the death threats escalated, at least, after I wrote an article that was on The Nation blog at the end of December – it was published in the January 10th issue, and it was a short essay trying to exam why the unemployed were not protesting. Why they weren’t doing what they had done during earlier periods of very serious unemployment, which was marching, rallying, and…”

At this point Piven eerily stopped herself from continuing to what one would presume would have been a discussion of the violent riots in Greece and the student riots in the UK – both of which Piven praised in that same article.

During Tuesday morning’s radio program Glenn didn’t get a chance to comment on Piven and Cenk Uygur’s bizarre analysis because he was out on a doctor’s visit.

(video via Frail 78-year-old knitting grandmother, Francis Fox Piven, threatened by Glenn Beck fans” was an attempt to mock the downplaying of Piven by The New York Times and Gawker. Regardless, Glenn used our headline on Monday’s television program as an example of how the liberal media was simply ignoring Piven’s calls for a violent class struggle in this country. Today’s headline is just another attempt at humor – I swear I’ve heard Glenn mention on the air he knits occasionally.