Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

by Dana Milbank

  After Democrats lost some off-year elections, Beck said of President Obama: “As a recovering alcoholic, may I say I recognize denial? … It’s like coming to in the bathroom on the floor, naked, for like the fifteenth day in a row.” Beck also found in his addiction the laissez-faire wisdom of the free market: “I can tell you with certainty, if no one allowed me to fail, if there were no consequences for my actions, if I kept my family, my job, my house, my wealth, everything else, I wouldn’t be able to stop drinking.”

  Beck’s special-needs daughter, too, provides a common Beck touchstone—perseverance. He had been told that Mary, who had several strokes at the time of her birth, would never “walk or talk or feed herself. She went to college. They were wrong,” Beck exulted one night on Fox. Another time, he described how Mary ran cross-country in high school and finished “in last place every single race she ran,” but still she “completed every race.”

  Why the constant references to his addictions and his daughter’s struggles? He seems to feel his honesty about personal struggles gives him moral authority—and immunity to whatever else might be alleged about him. “I will always tell you the truth, even when it hurts me personally,” he told his Fox viewers. By contrast, he said, “The left has already doctored photos, documents, Web sites, which frankly only dishonored them and hurt my children. But as I said to my kids this week, there’s more to come.”

  Beck said those words in early September 2009. Soon after, he took legal action to shut down a Web site called GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com. The site was a tasteless spoof of Beck’s spurious style of attack: Broadcast an outrageous allegation, qualify it by saying “I’m just asking the question,” and then assume it to be true because the victim of the attack doesn’t deny it. The joke was that if Beck refused to deny that he had raped and murdered a young girl twenty years ago, then, according to Beck’s own formula, it must be true.

  Beck, departing from his usual sense of self-awareness, filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization—an agency of the United Nations, which Beck routinely demonizes as part of a world-government conspiracy. The conspiratorial UN body ruled (naturally) against Beck and in favor of the man who set up the spoof Web site, Florida computer programmer Isaac Eiland-Hall.

  Having made his point—and, as a bonus, having lured Beck into acknowledging the authority of the United Nations—the satirist let Beck have the domain name.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE WHITE HORSE PROPHECY

  In one of his first appearances on Fox News—two months before he would start his own show—Glenn Beck sent a coded message to the nation’s six million Mormons—or at least those Mormons who believe in what the Latter-day Saints call “the White Horse Prophecy.”

  “We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance,” Beck told Bill O’Reilly on November 14, 2008, just after Obama’s election. “I feel the Constitution is hanging in the balance right now, hanging by a thread unless the good Americans wake up.”

  The Constitution is hanging by a thread.

  Most Americans would have heard this as just another bit of overblown commentary and thought nothing more of it. But to those familiar with the White Horse Prophecy, it was an unmistakable signal.

  The phrase is often attributed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church. Smith is believed to have said in 1840 that when the Constitution hangs by a thread, elders of the Mormon Church will step in to save the country.

  “When the Constitution of the United States hangs, as it were, upon a single thread, they will have to call for the ‘Mormon’ Elders to save it from utter destruction; and they will step forth and do it,” Brigham Young, Smith’s successor as head of the church, wrote in 1855.

  Was it just a coincidence in wording, or was Beck, a 1999 Mormon convert, speaking in coded language about the need to fulfill the Mormon prophecy? A conversation on Beck’s radio show ten days earlier would seem to rule out coincidence. Beck was interviewing Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, also a Mormon, when he said: “I heard Barack Obama talk about the Constitution and I thought, we are at the point or we are very near the point where our Constitution is hanging by a thread.”

  “Well, let me tell you something,” Hatch responded. “I believe the Constitution is hanging by a thread.”

  Days after Beck’s Fox show started in January 2009, he had Hatch on, and again prompted him: “I believe our Constitution hangs by a thread.”

  Hatch concurred.

  Large numbers of Mormons watch Beck, but likely an even larger number of his viewers and radio listeners are evangelical Protestants who have no idea that Beck is preaching to them nightly the theology of the Latter-day Saints.

  * * *

  There is no way to know how sincerely Glenn Beck holds his views. But we do know that he came to these views recently. He has told us that he was a blank slate before his 1999 conversion to Mormonism. “I didn’t know what was really happening in the world,” he has said, and “I really didn’t care.” And, after intense study of the faith, he emerged with the writings of a deceased Mormon thinker—John Birch Society supporter Cleon Skousen—serving as the foundation of his newly acquired worldview.

  “I remember, I used to be—believe it or not—a liberal,” Beck confessed to viewers one night. “I used to be a social liberal and everything else, but I was a fiscal conservative. Then I discovered alcoholism, and discovered AA, and sobered up. The only way that I knew I could stay sober is if I figured out what I really believe … I was never consistent on anything. Unless we’re consistent, I don’t think we can solve any problem.”

  Beck found consistency in Mormon theology—which he studied so fervently that he frustrated church leaders: “At one point I had the bishop with his head in his hands, saying ‘Glenn, I don’t have the answer to that question. I don’t think the president of our church has ever been asked that question,’ ” Beck writes in his book The Real America. “I took these through the ringer. Within a month I had exhausted the resources of Mormon.org and had moved on to Mormon Doctrine, a book more akin to scholarly use than light reading … I like scientific thinking, and I wanted it all to fall into line. For me to join, it needed to logically work and bear good fruit.”

  The fruit it bore was a philosophy—broadcast on radio and television—that is strikingly similar to the White Horse Prophecy of Joseph Smith.

  Before the Mormons went west, Smith traveled to Washington seeking help for his oppressed followers and received nothing but frustration. Rather than turning on the government, however, “They considered themselves the last Real Americans, the legitimate heirs of the pilgrims and Founding Fathers,” Pat Bagley writes in the Salt Lake Tribune. “And, they believed, the very survival of the Constitution depended on the Saints. From Smith on, LDS leaders prophesied the Constitution would one day hang by a thread, only to be saved by Mormons.”

  A compilation of church leaders’ statements over the years by the journal BYU Studies shows this strain of thinking. Though there are doubts about whether Smith actually wrote the phrase “hang by a thread,” his successors left no doubt about the theology behind it. Orson Hyde, a Smith contemporary, wrote that Smith believed that “the time would come when the Constitution and the country would be in danger of an overthrow; and said [Smith]: ‘If the Constitution be saved at all, it will be by the elders of this Church.’ ” The church’s fifth leader, Charles Nibley, believed that “the day would come when there would be so much of disorder, of secret combinations taking the law into their own hands, tramping upon Constitutional rights and the liberties of the people, that the Constitution would hang as by a thread. Yes, but it will still hang, and there will be enough of good people, many who may not belong to our Church at all, people who have respect for law and for order, and for Constitutional rights, who will rally around with us and save the Constitution.”

  The prophecy was renewed with each g
eneration of church leadership. “The prophet Joseph Smith said the time will come when, through secret organizations taking the law into their own hands … the Constitution of the United States would be so torn and rent asunder, and life and property and peace and security would be held of so little value, that the Constitution would, as it were, hang by a thread,” church apostle Melvin Ballard said in 1928. “This Constitution will be preserved, but it will be preserved very largely in consequence of what the Lord has revealed and what this people, through listening to the Lord and being obedient, will help to bring about, to stabilize and give permanency and effect to the Constitution itself. That also is our mission.”

  And now Beck’s mission. Secret organizations? Tramping on liberties? Breakdown of law and order? Shredding the Constitution? Betraying the Founders? This is the core of Beck’s message, in his own words: “Some people in the government seem to have a problem, you know, shredding the Constitution. You’re trying to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, friends. It’s in trouble …” They are “going to bring us to the verge of shredding the Constitution, of massive socialism … They see the government as violating the Constitution, and they will see themselves as defenders of the Constitution. Not a good mix. Then they take matters into their own hands.”

  * * *

  Beck has often described himself as a mere jester. “I’m basically a rodeo clown just trying to entertain you every night,” he’s been known to say. For most of his career, as a morning-zoo radio DJ, he was nothing more than that.

  “We told our bosses right up front: We don’t need gimmicks to sell the new Y95,” Beck says at the start of a 1986 TV promo for his Phoenix radio show featuring “the new Y95’s zookeepers.” After a toy airplane flies by, Beck offers “plenty of easy contests for you to win lots of free money.” Cash falls from the ceiling and a stuffed bird swings on a rope. As he and his cohost continue, balloons fall from the ceiling, a live monkey swings onto the set, walks onto the desk, and sips coffee, and a mannequin falls from the ceiling. “Hey, with all that talk on the new Y95, who needs gimmicks?” Beck asks.

  The closest he got to substance was offering listeners “your favorite love songs and chances to qualify for a dream trip to Hawaii” (that was on Washington’s WPGC). “Twelve before nine—it’s 8:48 with the A-Team,” he said on a typical Louisville morning on WRKA. “We’ve been asking you to call us up and tell us who do you think has more class, the fans of U of K or the fans of U of L?”

  If Beck had any trace, back then, of his current persona, it was his delight in causing offense. In New Haven, he and his partner made fun of Asian Americans, using a mock accent; the Hartford Advocate reported that the station had to apologize. (The ethnic games have continued. As recently as 2003, he had this to say of Barbra Streisand in his Real America book: “Sometimes I just feel like screaming, ‘Shut up, you big-nosed cross-eyed freak!’ ” And of Joe Lieberman: “I know Joe well. Well, we’re not buddies or anything, not like we’re out buying yarmulkes together.”)

  Beck made a rare foray into public affairs one morning in 1986 after Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya. He and a friend had written a song with the chorus “Gaddafi Sucks, Gaddafi Sucks” and Reagan’s voice saying “Frankly, Gaddafi sucks” over the New Wave music of the time. Beck was tentative: “I originally didn’t want to play it because I felt it was a little too offensive,” he said, “but we’re going to play it here and we’d like to hear what you think.”

  The station was flooded with supportive calls. Caller “Eric” said of Libyan terrorists: “We should bring them back to the United States and publicly execute them, probably just slow torture on world TV.” Eric further proposed: “Give them a couple alternatives like slide them down, down a, well I’m trying to think, a pool of razor blades filled with alcohol. Slowly lower them into a pool of piranhas.”

  Beck was mild in his response. “Thank you Eric, appreciate it, bye-bye,” he said to the angry man. But he had learned that he had the power to rile. “I just want to say, I feel really good,” he said as he signed off the air that morning.

  When, in the 1990s, he moved to Connecticut—where he crashed, sobered up, changed wives, and found religion—Beck was searching for an ideology beyond that of the morning zoo. With the help of Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, Beck, then a supporter of abortion rights who wore his hair in a ponytail, enrolled in a religion class at Yale. It was, he recalled, titled “Early Christology: The Making of the Image of Christ.” At the same time, he endeavored to have books replace drinks in his life: He went to bookstores and assembled “the library of a serial killer,” including titles by Alan Dershowitz, the pope, Nietzsche, Hitler, Carl Sagan, Billy Graham, Plato, and Kant.

  As he read philosophy and searched for a church, Beck began to adopt a more conservative persona, on air and off. During the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings of late 1998 and early 1999, he gave his patron Lieberman a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage to encourage him to vote to convict Clinton. “He was offended,” Beck later recalled. “That was the last time we ever spoke.”

  Beck’s conversion to Mormonism in 1999 coincided with a whole new level of conservative positions. By now he had short hair and at some point along the way acquired what he calls his “relatively new” position of being “staunchly pro-life.” But he didn’t embrace all of the Mormon customs, such as those involving foul language. While still at KC101 in Connecticut a month after his baptism, he hurled obscenities on air at a caller who complained about “people like you and Rush Limbaugh talking about morality and you have none.” Beck told her, “You don’t give a crap about the truth” and called her an “evil little bitch.”

  Beck finally got what he wanted in 2000: a chance to follow radio successes such as Limbaugh into an all-talk format. He got an afternoon radio spot in Tampa and was soon nationally syndicated. Then, as now, his format was about public affairs but often had nothing to do with the news of the day. Writing in 2003 about attending a talk-radio convention, he recalled being bored by the topics the others were talking about: taxes, prescription drugs, party politics, and the presidential campaign. “Does anybody want to hang out with anybody who is excited by that collection of Jack Kevorkian, auto-suicidal C-SPAN material?” Beck asked. “If you can’t interest a roomful of talk-show hosts in partisan politics, you certainly can’t get somebody who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and works at the Dunkin’ Donuts to listen to it.”

  No, Beck knew that he needed something more dramatic than the news of the day. To become really big in the talk business, he didn’t need to inform his audience. He needed to entertain them, anger them, frighten them. And he found what he needed in his new church.

  * * *

  On the morning of July 16, 2009, Beck was on the air for his radio show when he asked his producer, not for the first time, “Can you get the Ezra Taft Benson quote for me?” For listeners, he identified Benson as Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture. He did not disclose that Benson was also the thirteenth president of the Mormon Church, who died five years before Beck’s baptism.

  Beck played the audio of Benson recounting a conversation with Khrushchev in which the Soviet leader told him: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.”

  Beck developed Benson’s views into a cornerstone of his own philosophy as he waged war against “progressives” trying to sneak communism into America “step by step,” as he puts it. “Progressivism says, ‘Bit by bit we’ll eat at the Constitution,’ ” Beck informed his viewers. Another day, he described the progressive plan “to rot America from the inside … make progress, baby steps.”

  At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, he asked the audience, “What’s the difference” between a communist and a progressive? “Well, there’s no difference except one requi
res a gun and the other does it slowly, piece by piece, eating away at it,” Beck explained, channeling Benson.

  * * *

  Beck’s embrace of Mormon political thinkers actually begins with a Roman Catholic: the late Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University. An otherwise reputable academic, Quigley became celebrated among conspiracy types for a brief passage in his 1966 tome, Tragedy & Hope, in which he described the workings of the so-called Round Table Group.

  “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network,” he wrote. He described a web of organizations including the Council on Foreign Relations and J.P. Morgan & Co., and said that “this elaborate, semi-secret organization” aimed to “coordinate the international activities,” and had behind it “the power of the international financial coterie.”

  Quigley’s words, which get some credit for launching the One World Government conspiracy, inspired many conspiracy theorists who came to influence Beck’s views quite directly. But Quigley’s original allegation had an effect on Beck as well.

  “Let me take you back to right after 9/11,” Beck told his viewers one night. “I was a really lazy American. I didn’t know much about American history. I didn’t know anything about anything really … I started to read everything I could get my hands on. One of the books I found was this one, Tragedy & Hope.”

  Beck said Quigley had “a better idea than the doomsday device or MAD” (the cold-war nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction). “Instead of tying everybody to a master computer that showed that we’re going to blow everything up, they decided to tie everybody’s economies together … Mutually assured economic destruction, OK? No weapons involved—just money, tie it all together.”

  Another time, Beck told radio listeners: “I know it’s not popular to quote Carroll Quigley but if you’ve ever read Tragedy & Hope from the 1960s, you see this being played out.” And what was being “played out”? There exists, he argued, a “shadow government” in which the Democratic and Republican parties are identical, both secondary to the “companies taking over and really controlling everything.”