WHAT'S GLENN BECK FREAKING OUT ABOUT NOW?

Yeah, I know -- "Glenn who?" But he's still out there, doing online TV that nobody pays for and radio that stupid people listen to while ironing, or whatever it is they do while he's on, and his latest freakout comes in response that there's going to be -- hold on to your hats, kiddies -- a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Well, OK, not just a test but a national test, on November 9, on every broadcast station simultaneously, which is apparently a first. No, wait -- don't fall asleep, let me finish. And apparently it's now called the Emergency Alert System. Hello? Are you still awake? In any case, it's all explained at the Web sites of the FCC and FEMA, if you can stand the excitement.

It sounds boring and unremarkable if you're a rational person, but it's freaking Beck out:

THE STATE CAN 'SEIZE CONTROL' AND 'THERE IS NOTHING I CAN DO': GLENN WEIGHS IN ON NOV. 9TH EMERGENCY BROADCAST TEST

The Blaze recently reported that at 2 p.m. EST on Wednesday, November 9th, The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission will conduct the first-ever national test of the Emergency Alert System, where radio and televised broadcasts across the country will be disrupted for roughly...three-and-half minutes:

"In essence, the authority to seize control of all television and civilian communication has been asserted by the executive branch and handed to a government agency," wrote Buck Sexton in our earlier report....

While emergency broadcast tests are typically used by state and local governments to issue severe weather alerts and other emergency information, there has never been a nationwide activation of the system before. Federal agencies cite the reasons for the national test are to ensure emergency preparedness and to pinpoint flaws in the new EAS system.

Meanwhile, the thought of the nation's broadcast systems being completely cut off for nearly four minutes -- in addition to broadcasters being stripped of control -- has left many, including Glenn, feeling unsettled over who, exactly, will have power over our airwaves.

When speaking about the old EBS tests, Glenn said that it "didn't take control away from the broadcaster." The new system, however, "seizes control of the broadcast frequency."

"If the state wants to take control...they can just take it and there is nothing I can do about it" Glenn stated....

The clip below is weird. Like other clips from Beck's non-Fox work, it has (in part) a Morning Zoo vibe that hints at the sane person coexisting with all those layers of barking lunacy. And then, near the end, Beck plays down the import of all this, saying we'll be as free after it's over as we are now. (Though considering what a fascist tyranny he thinks we live in, I'm not sure that's meant to be reassuring.)

But in between is the freakout -- no he doesn't flail and cry the way he did on Fox, but he just can't believe that we're doing this when we didn't even do it during the Cold War, when we could have been nuked, dammit!

So I guess (a) we're not facing any threats as a nation, and (b) we shouldn't ever do anything technologically that we didn't do in, say, 1961, because to do so would be fascist and totalitarian.

In any case, watch the clip and learn how we're going to head just that much further along the road to serfdom in a couple of weeks because the government wants to test an emergency messaging system.