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

by Dana Milbank

  Beck turned to his guests, author R. J. Pestritto, law professor Carter Snead, and former Bush administration official John Hoff. “Gentlemen, first of all, does anybody here believe eugenics is coming, building a master race?”

  His guests did not believe this. “No, sir, absolutely not,” came the reply. It was time for Beck to find some new guests. Sure enough, he was back a few weeks later with Pastor Stephen Broden, who claimed to have chronicled “the eugenics movement and black genocide taking place in America today.”

  Beck genuinely seemed to be convinced that an African American president, advised by a Jewish chief of staff, was intent on building a master race. “The reason why I bring up Hitler so much of the time is because what he did, many of the things, had their roots, their seeds here in America,” Beck explained. “The progressive tactics haven’t changed much since then.”

  Beck’s tactics hadn’t changed much either. His own displeasure with the health-care system was now a distant memory. He set about demonstrating that Obama’s health-care legislation would cause rationing of care and euthanasia of the old and infirm. “Really, this is the beginning,” he argued. “I mean, you know, the extreme example is what happened in Germany … Sometimes for the common good, you just have to say, ‘Hey Grandpa, you’ve had a good life. Sucks to be you.’ ”

  There was nothing in the proposed bill that even hinted at such an idea, but Beck offered proof in the form of constant repetition. “The government is going to have to start rationing care during the last six months of life,” he said with certainty. “There’s going to be waiting lines and there’s going to be some bureaucrat deciding whether or not you should die.”

  When Sarah Palin came out with her “death panel” allegation in August 2009—adding fuel to that month’s town-hall conflagration, Beck quickly endorsed the theme. “That’s quite a statement. I believe it to be true,” he said of the accusation that the law would create euthanasia boards. After Obama himself pointed out that there was no such thing in the proposal, Beck came back with this: “He was saying yesterday in this meeting that nobody’s going to snuff out your grandma, and the crowd was laughing. You laugh all the way to the death panels.”

  Beck continued to defend Palin’s death-panels accusation. “She is right,” he proclaimed. “Basically, they come up with the number of maximum treatment costs per year to keep you alive.” Again, there was nothing about this in the bill.

  As the health-care bill followed its tortuous route to passage, Beck kept up the barrage: “Somebody is not going to get a kidney transplant. Somebody is not going to get heart surgery. Somebody is not going to get chemotherapy.” Specifically, Beck forecast that by age forty, “you’re starting to outlive your usefulness,” and by seventy, “you’re out of luck, Jack.”

  Whenever a new allegation bubbled up through the conservative blogosphere, Beck took it to his viewers. There was, for example, the accusation, based on nothing but imagination, that those who don’t heed the “individual mandate” to have health insurance will be locked away in prison. “If you don’t play ball with them now, if you don’t get into their government health care, there will be jail time.” (In reality, the legislation expressly forbids imprisoning those who refuse.)

  Another day, Beck spun an entire fantasy about what health-care legislation would do—including dietary restrictions and deciding who can reproduce. “They will tell you what to eat,” he intoned. “If you can be deemed someone who maybe shouldn’t have a baby, they can have their people come in. The government is in our homes on this.”

  The health-care debate went painfully on and on, like a botched hemorrhoid operation. At each stage, Beck found a new way to describe the bill as the End of the World as We Know It.

  “Your freedom is at stake. This is the moment. This is the bill. You must not allow this to pass,” he said in November 2009. “It will be a nail in the coffin of America … You must wake everybody up you know. This is the end of prosperity in America forever if this bill passes. This is the end of America as you know it.”

  In January, he declared that Democrats were declaring “the government God, our creator.” He added: “This is the end of the American Constitution.”

  The next month, he summoned his troops to the ramparts. “Republicans, you filibuster! You do everything you can!” he said. If the bill passes, “the Republic has frayed beyond, possibly, beyond repair.” He spoke of revenge at the polls, “assuming there’s a country left for a next election.”

  In March, he escalated to visions of violence. “If it passes,” Beck said, Obama will have “the pieces that the president needs to control every aspect of your life, to fundamentally transform America.” And if it doesn’t pass, “those on the left are going to become violent.” The laws will, he said, “rip this country in half.”

  Yet the bill continued its halting progress toward eventual passage. Dr. Beck took out an X-ray film on the set. “What they’re about to pass is not a tumor,” he said. “What they’re about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable … The fundamental transformation of America is here.”

  The bill passed. And, as of this writing, there are still no death panels, no eugenics, no euthanasia, nobody being sent to prison, no ripping in half of the country, no end of America as we know it, no nail in America’s coffin. Then again, maybe this is because of the painkillers; any day now, we could wake up with a huge pain in our national butt.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE MIDAS TOUCH

  Let us now hear from Glenn Beck, regular guy.

  “I am no different than you,” he tells viewers, with genuine regular-guy grammar. “I am just a regular schmo that finds myself on a set in New York.”

  “Look, I’m a schmo,” he confesses to a guest one night. “I really don’t know how all this stuff works.”

  “By the end of World War I, the power had shifted,” he informs his audience another night, “and really the schlubs—people like you and me, we didn’t even know it.”

  “Back before the Enlightenment,” he says on still another occasion, “there were kings and rulers, lords and ladies, the landowners, and then there were the serfs, everybody else, people like you and me.”

  A Tea Party leader is described as a “regular schmo just like you and me.” Beck says the government has a dim view of “dummies like you and me.” He asks whether the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is “part of the ruling class or is he with you and me.” He says that “if it were up to you or me, just regular schmoes in America, the Freedom Tower would have been done years ago.”

  Since Beck is using Yiddish when he speaks of schmoes and of schlubs, let’s do the same: It takes chutzpah to carry on with this shtick.

  When he finishes his regular-guy routine at Fox studios in Manhattan, Beck hops into his chauffer-driven sedan and takes the drive home to New Canaan, Connecticut, ranked by CNN Money in 2008 as the place with the highest median family income in the nation. The man who has just described himself as a “serf” rather than a “landowner” disembarks and steps into his sixteen-room neo-Colonial mansion on Ponus Ridge (Ponus was the Greek god of hard labor), which he purchased in 2005 for $4.25 million. Perhaps he winds down by taking a swim in the pool or strolling his 2.87 acres bordering Laurel Reservoir. When Beck, on the air, claims he lives in a “subdivision,” his followers probably don’t picture the compound on Ponus Ridge. It is a castle fit for a king, but unlike other castles, Beck’s, sadly, did not come with fortifications. So he built them. He showed up at the New Canaan Zoning Commission office in 2008 with his wife and his bodyguard and his lawyer, demanding an exemption from zoning laws to allow him to surround himself on all sides with a six-foot barrier: a four-foot stone wall topped by two feet of wood fencing in the front, and a six-foot wooden barrier elsewhere.

  The lawyer explained to the town elders how a portion of the wall had “already mistakenly been built.” Oops! A neighbor and
board members said they didn’t think fortifying the Beck estate was necessary. The New Canaan Advertiser wrote that at the meeting, Beck’s lawyer explained that Beck was a hunted man. The barrier “won’t stop them but it will slow them down,” the attorney said. “It will stop anything people send into the property, whether photographs or bullets.”

  Bullets! On Ponus Ridge in New Canaan! It was sounding like one of those postapocalyptic scenarios on Beck’s show, when people defend their property with guns and plant vegetables to survive. In reality, the closest the New Canaan police came to witnessing that sort of violence was “a report” about “an individual banging on a door” at Beck’s manse.

  The commoner/serf/schmo Beck describes his business empire as if he’s running a convenience store. “I’m a small businessman,” he explains. “I do radio, I do television and Internet. I write books. I print a news and humor magazine. And I built it all from scratch with the help of an amazing group of people.”

  His is a rags-to-nicer-rags tale. Or perhaps he would use the Yiddish word for rags, schmattas. “In 1999, only in America—in 1999, I couldn’t afford my rent of $695 a month,” he says. “Things have changed, and as of right now, my business is doing pretty well. But just like you, I’m concerned about tomorrow.”

  But not that concerned. His business empire, according to Forbes, is worth $32 million a year: $13 million in publishing from his books (he has a profit-sharing deal with Simon & Schuster) and his Fusion magazine; $10 million for radio (actually $45 million over five years); $4 million from his Web site; $3 million from tours and speaking (he does comedy shows in addition to the Bold & Fresh Tour with Bill O’Reilly); and a mere $2 million from Fox News to round out the portfolio.

  Beck does not let the schlubs and schmoes in his audience know about such riches, but he was happy to boast about them to the elites. He allowed a Forbes reporter to follow him around for “several days” to report a story on his empire. The reporter found such regular-guy staples in Beck’s life as the cockatoo he rented for $750 a night as a prop for his stage performance.

  Beck, the magazine reported, has thirty-four full-time staffers (that apparently doesn’t include the staff of similar size provided for him by Fox). He has a publicist separate from Fox and travels everywhere with bodyguards. His media empire (it has changed its name from Mercury Radio Arts to Glenn Beck Inc.) nearly rivals Oprah’s in its clout. In May 2010, Beck boasted that five of the titles in the Amazon top twenty-five bestseller list were books he had promoted on air: George Washington’s Sacred Fire (number 1), The Real George Washington (8), Samuel Adams: A Life (15), Beck’s yet-to-be-published The Overton Window (16), and The 5,000 Year Leap (22).

  When Beck does describe his huge income, he does so with a “spread the wealth” philosophy that sounds a lot like the Barack Obama view that Joe the Plumber condemned. “I think it’s obscene to have that kind of earning potential and not spread the wealth with the people who help you to get there,” Beck writes. He also says he tithes 10 percent of his earnings. “Once you commit to giving away your 10 percent, you will get so much more,” he said.

  Of course, when you make what Beck does, it is probably less painful to give away 10 percent than it is for the typical working schlub with whom Beck identifies. Beck’s own prescriptions for America would cause his millions to be taxed much less while increasing taxes on the schmoes and schlubs. He proposes a federal flat tax on income and mentions no exemption for the poor or middle class: “Reduce the size of government in half,” he proposed on his Fox show in 2010. “Flat tax of 12 to 15 percent.” Because most of Beck’s income should be in the 35 percent tax bracket, this would reduce his own payments by nearly two-thirds. The nearly half of all Americans who pay no federal income taxes—the schlubs and schmoes, as Beck might say—would see their tax obligations rise sharply.

  Beck originally named his business after Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre radio series. He writes in his 2003 book, The Real America, that he admires the way Welles figured out that he could be more efficient if he had an ambulance take him from job to job. He wasn’t sick, but it saved time: “Welles hired an ambulance to pick him up from the Broadway show, turn the sirens on, and take him to CBS, where he played a role on the radio,” Beck writes. “Then they would pack him back in the ambulance, turn the sirens on again and go back to the Broadway theater to do the second show.”

  Some might regard this as fraud; Beck regards it as pure genius. “Welles inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine,” he concludes. Even if it is based on a lie.

  To the chagrin of Fox News, Beck, even as he has chased away advertisers, has done an exceptional job marketing one product: himself. He often directs Fox viewers to his own Web site, GlennBeck.com, encouraging them to purchase an elite membership. One night, he devoted a segment to promoting his own one-man show on Broadway.

  “Tomorrow night here in New York at the Nokia Theater in Times Square I’m doing a program,” Beck told Fox viewers. “You can see it on ‘The Insider’ at GlennBeck.com.” That’s the pay-extra membership class. “I’m doing a show called ‘The Future of History’ because we’ve got to learn history to be able to face our future.”

  What brings all of Beck’s moneymaking ventures—TV, radio, Web, publishing, speaking—together is a common theory that doomsday means payday. Though it’s a huge audience for cable news, Beck’s viewership as a proportion of the American public is small: 0.9 percent. Though figures are less reliable for radio, that audience could be as high as 3 percent of the population.

  But this tiny slice of the American public is passionate and highly motivated, and they will evidently do, and buy, what Glenn Beck tells them to do and buy. If he tells them that the world economy is collapsing, that currencies are becoming worthless, and that they should buy gold, they buy gold. Conveniently enough, a top sponsor of Beck’s radio, TV, and Internet ventures is Goldline, a big gold dealer.

  Go to GlennBeck.com and you see a banner advertisement across the top: “Goldline. Trusted and Used by Glenn Beck.” To the right of that is another ad, with a photo of Beck: “Goldline International. Get Your Free Investor Kit.” Below that is a third ad: “Click for a free investment kit. Trusted and used by Glenn Beck.” His smiling face is next to a gold coin. If you click on the ads, you’ll wind up at a site announcing “Glenn Beck Recommends Goldline” or a photo of Beck and his testimonial: “Before I started turning you on to Goldline, I wanted to look them in the eye. This is a top-notch organization that’s been in business since 1960.” Other links say, “Goldline Is Glenn Beck’s Choice for Gold” and give the advice that “some analysts believe that gold may rise to several thousand dollars per ounce.”

  Among those “analysts” is Beck himself. He has the Goldline president, Mark Albarian, on his show frequently, interviewing his sponsor about the merits of gold. “So, Mark, I saw a story last night that said we’re … we’re running out of gold,” Beck began one such interview. “Is that even possible?”

  “I think it is,” Albarian replied. “Now, we won’t actually run out of gold, but you’ll see much higher prices in my opinion.”

  Beck said a price of $2,500 per ounce would be “reasonable.” It was about $1,100 an ounce at the time of the interview.

  “There was an article on AOL where they talked about how you could get to $2,750,” Albarian added.

  “I think people are running out of options on what, you know, could be worth something at all,” Beck said. “You have to think like a German Jew, 1934.” Extending the analogy to Weimar hyperinflation, Beck predicted that people could “make more in the commodities in the short term than they can in the dollar because the dollar is going to continue to fall.”

  Seven months after this forecast, gold had climbed 9 percent—not bad. But the dollar, which Beck predicted would collapse, was up more than twice as much over that same period—21 percent against the euro.

  But for Beck, it’s always a good
time to buy gold, particularly from Goldline. Back in December 2008, he had Albarian on his show and the host spoke of a “1989-style Soviet collapse” for the American economy. “Still a good time to buy gold?” he asked.

  “It’s always a good time,” said the gold dealer.

  That message is a constant theme of Beck’s “the end is near” broadcasts. Sometimes on his chalkboard he will scribble “God, gold, guns”—the three safe harbors in a societal collapse.

  One night he held up a gold coin and explained how the dollar’s value will fall to the point where “we no longer can afford energy. We no longer can afford clothing. We can no longer afford bread or anything else.” One other evening, Beck’s guest, “trend forecaster” Gerald Celente, announced that gold “topped over $1,000 an ounce today … By 2015, you’re going to see gold probably at $8,000 an ounce.”

  Another time, Beck was delighted to announce that “in the time that I was on the air, gold shot up $50.” He boasted in one interview with O’Reilly that gold was “significantly over $1,000 an ounce.”

  “That’s because of you,” O’Reilly joked. “You’re selling it every two minutes on your radio show.”

  That he is, and on his TV show, too. “The smart money is saying, ‘Hunker down, things could get much worse,’ ” was his investment counsel one night. On the radio, he told an anxious caller named Debbie that “it is increasingly possible that hyperinflation is coming our way,” so “we need to hedge our bet against that.” He went on to say that “gold has always been that doorframe” in an earthquake. “Doorframes are the safest place because it’s reinforced … Look at gold as the threshold, as a doorframe.”

  In one of his paid plugs for Goldline on the radio, Beck began with a joking preface—“Don’t tell anyone I’m getting paid for this commercial”—before recommending the purchase of gold “as an insurance policy” against calamity. “I hope I’m wrong in all the things that might be coming our way,” but “God only knows what tomorrow will bring,” he warned. “Check out Goldline,” he suggested. “Pray on it, make sure it’s right for you.”