by Dana Milbank
Interesting. But this resembles not in the least what Quigley was describing. Rather, Beck had embraced an interpretation of Quigley—a misinterpretation, Quigley himself said—by Cleon Skousen, who wrote a book, The Naked Capitalist, based on Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope. “Skousen is apparently a political agitator. I am an historian,” Quigley protested in a Mormon journal called Dialogue. Quigley had described a loose international organization aimed at improving economies; Skousen turned this into a nefarious plot to control the world. Beck embraced the latter.
Actually, Beck had embraced all things Skousen—particularly a book he had written called The 5,000 Year Leap, asserting that the Founders were moved by biblical law to write the Constitution. Skousen’s nephew Mark Skousen appeared on Beck’s show and recounted the episode in the conservative magazine Human Events:
“Last Friday, Beck passed out to the live audience a new edition of The 5,000 Year Leap, with an introduction by him. He told the audience, ‘Everyone should read this book.’ Between commercials, he told me that even though he had never met my uncle (he died in 2006), Cleon’s book changed his life. He said that a friend, without solicitation, sent him a copy of The 5,000 Year Leap, saying, ‘Glenn, I don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but it’s the simplest, easiest way for Americans of all ages to understand the simple yet brilliant principles our founders based this country on.’ Glenn read the book, and concluded: ‘The author was years ahead of his time. And our founders were thousands of years ahead of their time. My hope is that all Americans young and old will spend the time with this book to understand why we are who we are. The words of our Founding Fathers have a way of reaching across any political divide. They are words of wisdom that I can only describe as divinely inspired.’ ”
Beck pitched the book in his radio and TV shows. His promotion of The 5,000 Year Leap pushed the book, after three decades in obscurity, to number one in the Amazon.com rankings. Few could have known much about the author of the book they were all buying.
Skousen, an ally of the far-right John Birch Society, had been a cold-war communist hunter. He regarded The Manchurian Candidate not as a fictional movie but as a documentary. A Brigham Young University professor, he reacted to pressure on the Mormon Church to ordain blacks as priests by declaring that communists were attacking the Mormons.
Eventually, the head of the Mormon Church issued an edict to churches to “avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said” by Skousen’s movement. But Skousen’s movement (it changed its name from the Freemen Institute to the National Center for Constitutional Studies after militia groups began to use the “freemen” label) persisted. Skousen, claiming to represent the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, called for the abolition of Social Security, farm subsidies, and education and welfare funding; pulling out of the United Nations; and eliminating federal income taxes and most federal regulatory agencies.
Skousen’s ideas might have died with him, but all that changed when Beck turned The 5,000 Year Leap into his manifesto.
Skousen, at the start of the book, includes a diagram of the political spectrum stretching from “anarchy” to “tyranny.” Beck draws the very same diagram on his chalkboard, though he substitutes “total government” for “tyranny.”
“Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious,” Skousen wrote. “Communism and Fascism turned out to be different names for approximately the same thing—the police state.” Skousen argued that “the American founders considered the two extremes to be ANARCHY on the one hand, and TYRANNY on the other.” He wrote that the original Articles of Confederation were “too close to anarchy.”
Compare this to Beck, using the Skousen diagram on his chalkboard: “Fascism and communism are the same,” he said in March 2010. “It’s total anarchy that is on this end. Here’s the republic, here’s a progressive government that leads you to either fascism or communism.” Another night, Beck gestures to the “tyranny” end of the drawing: “This here is fascism, communism, statism. This is total complete control by the government.” He gestures to the other side. “This is anarchy here.” He tells viewers that the “Articles of Confederation … was as close to this line to anarchy as we could possibly get.”
Alas, Skousen’s—and therefore Beck’s—view of the Founders’ intent is a bit creative. Skousen’s book, for example, has a section titled “The Founders Warn Against the Drift Toward the Collectivist Left.” As evidence of this warning, he uses a quote from Jefferson: “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”
But Skousen neglects to mention that the quote was part of an argument Jefferson was having with his rivals in the Federalist Party. They, too, were Founders, and they argued the other side: that government should be stronger. Then, as now, the proper size of government was fiercely debated.
Likewise, Skousen supplies a quotation from Benjamin Franklin “emphasizing the importance of marriage as he attempted to dissuade a young friend from taking a mistress.” He quotes Franklin: “Marriage is the proper remedy. It is the most natural state of man, and therefore the state in which you are most likely to find solid happiness.”
But Skousen doesn’t quote from the rest of the same Franklin letter, in which he argues that it is better to take older women as mistresses because “they are so grateful,” because “they are more prudent and discreet,” and because “the compunction is less.” Writes Franklin: “As in the dark all cats are gray, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement.”
Skousen’s history was heavily doctored, but it gave Beck a template. He took up the cause of the late Skousen. He started “Founders’ Fridays” on his Fox show to preach this selective reading of history. His goal: to restore America to the fanciful state, invented by Skousen, in which all of the Founding Fathers support Beck’s worldview.
“Tonight,” he said at the beginning of one Founders’ Friday, “we want to do revisionist history.” He proposed to “show you some of the examples of where history is just wrong.”
He began with George Washington, father of our country, understood through history to be, like many other Founders, a Deist—a believer in a noninterventionist God. Not so, Beck announced. “Washington was just a die-hard Christian.”
He brought in Peter Lillback, president of the Westminster Theological Seminary, to prove it. “He had a vibrant personal Anglican or Episcopalian Christian faith,” Lillback confirmed. But this has been hidden by a generations-long conspiracy by secular historians! “A devout evangelical Christian Founding Father didn’t play well for those that wanted to move beyond Christian influence,” Lillback alleged.
Lillback went on to argue that “a form of historical revisionism” has required people to take the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument rather than the stairs. Sure, the Parks Service may say it’s because of safety and crowd control, but Lillback thinks it’s really because the stairwells contain “scriptural messages.”
“I can’t prove this, but I’ve heard that there is a copy of the top of the Washington Monument that’s on display in a museum in Washington, but it has been carefully turned so you can’t see the Latin words” meaning “Glory to God,” Lillback went on to assert. “I heard that said so many times, it must be true.”
Now that’s academic rigor.
An honest discussion of the view of the Founders as die-hard Christians might have addressed the words of Thomas Paine, whom, in other contexts, Beck has celebrated as a champion of liberty. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of,” Paine wrote in The Age of Reason. “My own mind is my own church.”
Instead, Beck went to his next guest, historian Burto
n Folsom, to talk about how bad men such as Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama are undoing the good work of religious conservatives such as George Washington. “A lot of people would speculate that maybe Barack Obama has a little contempt for history of America or western civilization,” Beck proposed. “Do you see a pattern or a similarity between the two of them [Wilson and Obama] in that?”
Folsom did see a pattern (he must have wanted to be invited back to Beck’s show). Wilson and Obama “don’t share any kind of respect, deep respect for the Constitution,” he said. “Wilson thought it was outmoded and so does Barack Obama.”
“Right,” Beck concurred. “They don’t necessarily hate it, but it’s just that it was a nice thing in the past.”
“It worked in 1776, but today we can trust leaders with more power,” Folsom said.
The Constitution is hanging by a thread. As Beck views it, he alone speaks for the Founders, and “there’s no sidelines here. You’re either on the side of the revolutionaries for Marxism and a new Venezuela here in America, or the revolutionaries of 1776.” Mormon conspiracy theories may provide good entertainment for millions, but there is at least one group that isn’t amused. A number of Mormon scholars at Brigham Young got together to hold a panel discussion titled “Glenn Beck, Cleon Skousen and LDS Conservatism.” The session was written up in the Deseret News.
“He’s just throwing stuff out there,” political science professor Ralph Hancock said. In both Skousen and Beck, Hancock said, “I find … a trace of anti-intellectualism. My interest is to help connect a certain LDS conservative impulse or mood with a more deeply grounded intellectual conservatism.” Hancock, the newspaper reported, told the Mormon students in the audience that rather than going Beck’s route, they should “study diligently to increase our confidence that our intense feelings are common sense and can be rationally articulated.” The professor urged “alternatives to the kind of proof-texting, quote-listing approach,” such as “literature that is more substantial and sound.”
Soundness and substance? That’s death for ratings.
CHAPTER 4
THE END IS NEAR … AND THE
RATINGS ARE THROUGH THE ROOF!
“Three, two, one—Beck!”
The announcer’s voice, introducing Beck’s show in his first months on Fox News, suggested that something was about to explode. Invariably, it did.
“Come on, let’s go!” the cherubic entertainer invites, and the performance is under way. He whispers. He shouts. He bounces from his knees and waves his arms wildly. He puts his hand to his mouth and pauses to gather his thoughts and reflect on the gravity of the situation. He calls himself just “a regular schmo” who’s asking questions.
But the questions, shouts, and whispers all point in one direction: The End Is Near.
“I haven’t verbalized what I think is coming next because I think it’s horrific. I think what’s coming is horrific,” he tells us on the radio. “I don’t even want to speak it out loud. I’ve said it to my wife; she sat up in the bed for quite a while and just kind of couldn’t get her arms around it. I hope I’m wrong. I pray that I’m wrong.”
And: “You’ve got to be off this ship. You’ve got to build lifeboats. You got to prepare your family.”
And: “These bills are creating the path to America’s destruction! They are building a machine and they’re about to turn the darn thing on! You don’t compromise on your destruction.”
And: “I think we are headed for extraordinarily dangerous times. I think we are … headed—we’re headed toward civil unrest. God knows what. Please, America—please, keep things under control and look at Martin Luther King and Gandhi as an example.”
And: “The country may not survive Barack Obama … If he does fundamentally transform America, we’re done. You don’t have to worry about a 2012.”
Seldom does a night pass without a dire warning such as “our very country is at stake,” or perhaps even an illustration of the calamity. “So, here are the three scenarios that we could be facing,” he tells viewers one evening. “Recession, depression, or collapse.” He writes the three possibilities on his chalkboard, in case it wasn’t clear.
Well, thank you, Mr. Beck, and have a nice doomsday.
Of all the strains running through Beck’s brain—philosophical, historical, and sometimes paranoid—the apocalyptic strain seems to be the most enduring. Though he has come only lately to his view that “progressivism” is the source of all evil, he has long promoted a vision of doom that, by design or coincidence, fits neatly with the End Times views of many of his fundamentalist viewers.
For Fox News viewers new to Beck’s end-of-the-world thinking, he held a special show on the subject a month after arriving. It was called “Faith and Survival; Surviving the Unthinkable.”
The program even came with a disclaimer at the start: “Warning: Topics discussed on today’s program may be disturbing to some viewers. The views expressed in this program are not predictions of what will happen, but what could happen. The panelists have been asked to think the unthinkable. Viewer discretion is advised.”
For the night, Beck turned his set into “the war room” and proposed to “play out some of the worst-case scenarios.” Promised Beck: “We’re going to try to show you how to prepare for the worst while everybody else is sitting back and hoping for the best.”
“The truth is,” he said with high drama, over what he later called “spooky” music, “that you are the defender of liberty.”
Here are the scenarios Beck laid out for his defenders of liberty, all occurring in the year 2014:
“All the U.S. banks have been nationalized. Unemployment is about between 12 percent and 20 percent. Dow is trading at 2,800. The real estate market has collapsed. Government and unions control most of the business, and America’s credit rating has been downgraded.”
“Global civil unrest. Now, the United States is no longer the world’s policeman. Mexico has been taken over by narco gangs. Oil and gas pipelines have been targeted and destroyed. Tourism nonexistent due to safety concerns.”
“Anger and discontent at home. The year is 2014. Many Americans are feeling disenfranchised. People are isolated from their political leaders and have been betrayed over and over and over again. Internet connects like-minded people and the ‘Bubba Effect’—a rise in individual militias.”
One guest, Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute, elaborated: “New York City looks like Mexico City … We’re going to see major cities look like Calcutta. There is going to be the homeless, panhandlers, hookers.”
Don’t forget hyperinflation, Beck added. “Money is, in our scenario … really worthless … People make their own money.” He then stepped back from the hypothetical and showed his audience a “Liberty Dollar,” a counterfeit “barter” currency that had been circulated in Indiana. Federal authorities had arrested various people in connection with distributing the silver and gold coins, but Beck was encouraging the counterfeiters on national television.
Beck resumed his war gaming, announcing that there would be no more Social Security and no government. “Nothing is safe,” said Beck.
Beck then proposed to start growing his own food, saying, “I worry about my kids.”
Another guest, retired military man Tim Strong, described a “survivalist attitude” of communities fending for themselves.
“That’s like a ‘Mad Max’ community,” Beck observed, later adding that the results would at the very least be “disenfranchisement and a possible uprising here in the United States.”
They spoke about war in the Middle East and 95 percent tax rates.
“Tax revolts,” said Beck.
“This is going to be violent,” added Celente. “The cities are going to look like Dodge City. They’re going to be uncontrollable. You’re going to have gangs in control, motorcycle marauders.” (Celente had earlier offered viewers the Web site of a survival combat trainer, AttackProof.com.)
“This is
the scenario that would tear this country apart, and spiral us into something that maybe we have never even seen before, including the Civil War,” Beck declared. “This scenario scares the living daylights out of me because it is completely—it is shaking nitroglycerine.”
Apparently the host wasn’t the only one who had the living daylights scared out of him. Beck had encouraged a new wave of survivalists planning for the apocalypse. Something called the “Survival Seed Bank” began advertising on Beck’s show.
“Are you worried about the economy?” a man asks at the beginning of a commercial for the company, which at first sounds like a Beck parody. “Have you ever wondered if the politicians and the bankers are going to bring the whole thing crashing down? If so, pay close attention. Because in an economic meltdown, non-hybrid seeds could become more valuable than even silver and gold.”
The commercial shows Depression-era footage of breadlines. “After all,” the narrator continues, “securing a source of food for your family is the single most important thing you can do.” Cut to a scene of the man bringing a basket of vegetables into his kitchen. “Introducing the Survival Seed Bank,” he says. “The perfect mix of germination-tested non-hybrid seeds. You get enough seeds to plant a full-acre crisis garden. Remember: In a real economic crisis, non-hybrid seeds are the ultimate barter item.”
On the Illinois business’s Web site, the bank is offered for $149 plus $15 for shipping and handling (“for the general public, the price will be a fat $297” with “no discounts, even to FEMA or military personnel”) by calling a toll-free number. “Indestructible Survival Seed Bank Can Be Buried to Avoid Confiscation,” the Web site boasts.
