Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it’s a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.
But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s. [The Weekly Standard, 9/21/09]
I still gotta say, it’s repulsive when national figures in the media say that Obama acts like Adolf Hitler, that he rules the same way Adolf Hitler does. It’s just wrong. And when you say that President Obama has a deep hatred of white people –
[…]
It was Glenn Beck. He said, deep hatred of white people and the white culture. First of all, the phrase ‘the white culture’ I think is jarring to some people. [United Stations Radio Networks, Lou Dobbs Show, 7/30/09]
Republicans And Media Conservatives Have Decried Beck’s Violent Rhetoric, Conspiracies
Scarborough Slammed Beck’s “Violent Rhetoric” In Wake Of Tucson Shooting. In a January 18, 2011, Politico column, Joe Scarborough wrote:
We get it, Sarah Palin. You’re not morally culpable for the tragic shooting in Tucson, Ariz. All of us around the “Morning Joe” table agree, even if we were stunned that you would whine about yourself on Facebook as a shattered family prepared to bury their 9-year-old girl.
The same goes for you, Glenn Beck. You’ve attacked your political opponents with words designed to inspire hatred and mind-bending conspiracy theories from fans. Calling the president a racist, Marxist and fascist may be reprehensible, but it did not lead a mentally disturbed man to take a Glock to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s “Congress on Your Corner” event.
Good on ya, buddy. You weren’t personally responsible for the slaughter at the Safeway. Maybe you can put it on a poster at the next “Talkers” convention.
But before you and the pack of right-wing polemicists who make big bucks spewing rage on a daily basis congratulate yourselves for not being responsible for Jared Lee Loughner’s rampage, I recommend taking a deep breath. Just because the dots between violent rhetoric and violent actions don’t connect in this case doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore the possibility — or, as many fear, the inevitability — that someone else will soon draw the line between them.
Actually, someone already has. When you get a minute, Google “Byron Williams” and “Tides Foundation” to see just how thin a layer of ice Beck skates on every day. [Politico, 1/18/11]
Former Bush Speechwriter Frum: Beck Creates “Alternative Reality” Allowing Conservatives To “Dupe Themselves” Using “Pretend Information.” In a November 12, 2010, New York Times op-ed, David Frum wrote:
Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord. [The New York Times, 11/12/10]
Senator Gregg: Beck Is A “Screamer” Who Has “No Interest In The Facts.” In a September 14, 2010, article on Politico, Ben Smith reported that then-Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) chastised Beck as one of the primary “screamers” who he claimed unfairly “demonized” the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP):
Rammed through Congress in the final months of the Bush administration by a political and financial establishment that felt it had looked into the abyss, TARP had the support of not just President Barack Obama but also his likely foes in 2012, such as former Govs. Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin. But it has been only sporadically defended, or even explained, by leaders of both parties who have shown decidedly little courage of their convictions.
“It’s become demonized on the left and the right by screamers — Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow — who have no interest in the facts; they’re just interested in hyperbolizing and generating attention,” lamented New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a key player in guiding the measure through the upper chamber and one of the few Republicans willing to talk about TARP in positive terms. [Politico, 9/14/10]
Former Bush Press Secretary Fleischer: “I Find Glenn Beck To Be A Little Weird And A Little Creepy.” In an August 28, 2010, post to his Facebook account, Ari Fleischer wrote:
I find Glenn Beck to be a little weird and a little creepy, but he’s entitled to give a speech on the Mall. How come the press didn’t go nuts when Louis Farrakhan and other out-there groups used the Mall to promote their thinking? It’s called press bias and it’s a double standard. [Facebook, 8/28/10]
NewsBusters’ Whitlock Criticized Beck For “Play[ing] The Nazi Card.” In an August 27, 2010, post to conservative media criticism blog NewsBusters, Scott Whitlock criticized Beck for “play[ing] the Nazi card” when condemning Good Morning America‘s segment on Beck’s 8-28 rally, saying “it is over-the-top”:
Good Morning America’s Claire Shipman on Friday launched a pre-emptive one-sided attack on Glenn Beck’s August 28 rally in Washington D.C., including selectively editing clips from the conservative host. The ABC journalist featured a snippet of Beck asserting, “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King.” [MP3 audio here.]
On his radio show, Friday, Beck complained about the “hatchet job.” Shipman clearly distorted the context. He actually said, “Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln. Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King. Those are American icons, American ideas and we should just talk about character.” (H/T to The Right Scoop and Noel Sheppard.)
Playing the segment on the radio, Beck hyperbolically declared, “That’s what Goebbels did. The truth didn’t matter.” Now, while ABC should be criticized for the dishonest editing job, it is over-the-top to play the Nazi card. [NewsBusters, 8/27/10]
Weekly Standard‘s Continetti: “For Beck, Conspiracy Theories Are Not Aberrations. They Are Central To His Worldview.” In a June 28, 2010, article in The Weekly Standard, Matthew Continetti wrote:
“Socialism and fascism,” the author writes in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, “have been on the rise for two administrations now.” Beck’s book Arguing with Idiots contains a list of the “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” on which Pol Pot (No. 10), Adolf Hitler (No. 6), and Pontius Pilate (No. 4) all rank lower than FDR (No. 3) and Woodrow Wilson (No. 1). In Glenn Beck’s Common Sense Beck writes, “With a few notable exceptions, our political leaders have become nothing more than parasites who feed off our sweat and blood.”
This is nonsense. Whatever you think of Theodore Roosevelt, he was not Lenin. Woodrow Wilson was not Stalin. The philosophical foundations of progressivism may be wrong. The policies that progressivism generates may be counterproductive. Its view of the Constitution may betray the Founders’. Nevertheless, progressivism is a distinctly American tradition that partly came into being as a way to prevent ideologies like communism and fascism from taking root in the United States. And not even the stupidest American liberal shares the morality of the totalitarian monsters whom Beck analogizes to American politics so flippantly.
Read and watch enough Glenn Beck, and you realize that he is not only introducing new authors and ideas into public life, he is reintroducing old ideas. Some very old ideas. The notion that America’s leaders are indistinguishable from America’s enemies has a long and sorry history. In the 1950s it led Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, to proclaim that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer. For this, William F. Buckley Jr. famously denounced Welch and severed the Birchers’ ties to mainstream conservatism. The group was ostracized for decades.
But not everyone denounced Welch. One author, the Mormon autodidact W. Cleon Skousen, continued to support the Birchers as he penned books on politics and the American founding. And Skousen continued to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American political, social, and economic elites were working with the Communists to foist a world government on the United States.
Glenn Beck is a Skousenite. During the “We Surround Them” program, he urged his audience to read Skousen’s 5000 Year Leap (1981), for which he has written a foreword, and The Real George Washington (1991). “The 5000 Year Leap is essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did,” the author writes in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense. More controversially, Beck has recommended Skousen’s Naked Communist (1958) and Naked Capitalist (1970), which lay out the writer’s paranoid scenarios in detail. The latter book, for example, draws on Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (1966), which argues that the history of the 20th century is the product of secret societies in conflict. “Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope,” says a character in Beck’s new novel, The Overton Window. “The only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace.”
For Beck, conspiracy theories are not aberrations. They are central to his worldview. They are the natural consequence of assuming that the world hangs by a thread, and that everyone is out to get you. [The Weekly Standard, 6/28/10]
Little Green Footballs’ Johnson: Beck’s “Show By Itself Should Have Been Enough To Thoroughly Discredit Beck To Any Sane Person.” Conservative blogger Charles Johnson wrote on his blog, Little Green Footballs, “TIME Magazine’s David Von Drehle asks: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? I don’t know why anyone would think a far right populist demagogue who rants and weeps in front of millions of people and spreads conspiracy theories straight out of the canon of the John Birch Society would be a bad thing.” He continued: “The following show by itself should have been enough to thoroughly discredit Beck to any sane person. But the right wing didn’t even blink at it.” [Little Green Footballs, 9/17/09]
Frum: Beck Is Doing “Terrible Damage” With “Paranoid And Hysterical” Smears. In a September 11, 2009, blog post titled “GOP Surrenders to Beck’s Mob Rule,” Frum stated: “When Glenn Beck made his Fox debut, some shrewd conservatives responded with a wink. Maybe the show was paranoid and hysterical. Maybe Beck was none too scrupulous about facts and truth. But why be squeamish? The other side did as bad, or nearly. And see how usefully he mobilized the base! Those shrewd conservatives assumed Beck was working for them. Big mistake. Beck is working for himself — and he chooses his targets according to his own scheme of priorities.” In the blog post, Frum discussed Beck’s smears against Obama administration official Cass Sunstein and stated: “Glenn Beck is not the first to make a pleasant living for himself by reckless defamation. We have seen his kind before in American journalism and American politics, and the good news is that their careers never last long. But the bad news is that while their careers do last, such people do terrible damage.” [FrumForum, 9/11/09]
Former GOP Congressman Inglis: Beck Is “Trading On Fear,” Viewers Should Turn Off His Show. At an August 6, 2009, town hall event, then-Republican Representative Bob Inglis (SC) said to attendees who watch Glenn Beck, according to a spokesman’s comments to Politico‘s Ben Smith, “What I would suggest is turn that television off when he comes on.” Rep. Inglis also accused Beck of “trading on fear.” [Politico, 8/07/09]
In a bit of cloying irritation Fox and the NFL managed to salute the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan yesterday during the pre-game festivities to the Super Bowl.![Share This icon](http://static1.firedoglake.com"/plugins/share-this/images/share-icon-16x16.gif"){kind=icon}
On January 29, five days into massive pro-democracy protests that shook the nation of Egypt, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak appointed his “
