by Dana Milbank
He must, for example, warn his followers of imminent takeover by foreigners. In Coughlin’s day, it was an attempt by the Roosevelt administration to join the World Court, part of the League of Nations. “Our entrance into this flagless nation,” he said, “belittles the vigorous valor of patriotism.”
Beck, updating the technique, fights international agreements on climate and anything else the United Nations tries to do. “I will vehemently oppose any measure giving another country, the United Nations, or any other entity power over U.S. citizens,” he said.
The successful demagogue must also hint darkly of violence to come. Coughlin had visions of “a revolution in this country which will make the French Revolution look silly.” He said his ideas “must be fought for unto death, if necessary.”
Beck, taking Coughlin’s baton, warns of “something far worse than the Depression,” something like a “possible uprising here in the United States.” He outlined a scenario of “something that maybe we have never even seen before, including the Civil War.”
The would-be leader of the angry masses must also ready his ranks for martyrdom. “You can prepare yourself for reprisals,” Coughlin warned his millions of listeners. “You will be referred to as nit-wits and morons. Your program will be disparaged as the brain-child of a demagogic crackpot and your organization will be listed among the so-called radicals … If patriotism is referred to as bigoted isolation, we will gladly accept these charges with the same philosophic attitude in which our forebears were trademarked with the name of rebel and revolutionist.”
Beck’s modern version: “People will again be afraid, be afraid this time of being called a racist or a bigot or a hatemonger. America, you speak without fear, or … you will not be able to speak, and you will experience the kind of fear that no one in this country has experienced before. All it will take—God help us all—all it will take is an event, or an emergency.”
In philosophy, there is one big difference between the two men. Coughlin spoke weekly of “social justice”—making sure the workingman got a share of the capitalist’s fortune—and formed the National Union for Social Justice. The antitax Beck, a rich man’s Coughlin, uses the same term, “social justice,” but has determined that it is at the root of communism, fascism, dictatorship, and every other evil short of tooth decay.
Yet even here, their styles are similar: Each man claims that God supports his interpretation of social justice. Coughlin waved around Pope Pius XI’s encyclical stating that government should “adjust ownership to meet the needs of the public good.” Beck, in turn, instructed listeners: “Look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find them, run as fast as you can.”
Beck, based on his research on Coughlin, told viewers that his predecessor “perverted American ideals for his own power and most importantly for social justice.” The radio priest, Beck argued, “thought FDR’s policies didn’t go far enough.” Further, Beck concluded that Coughlin was the “spookiest dude you’ve ever seen” and very different from his own movement. “You wouldn’t have this at the Tea Party,” Beck said of Coughlin’s fascist turn. “Tea parties are for small, limited government.”
Beck, in his research, may have missed this central part of Coughlin’s philosophy: “I believe in the simplification of government and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.” Or that bit about Coughlin being “wholly opposed to the Roosevelt taxes.” Or when Coughlin accused FDR of running up “the greatest debt in all history.”
And Beck at times sounds much like Coughlin as he gives a populist denunciation of government help for big business. “You have the global politicians, worldwide businessmen, and international bankers all trying to protect and stabilize giant global corporations,” he laments, “because their money and their influence helps the politicians grab even more power in their home countries.”
It’s true that Beck’s message, seventy-five years after Coughlin, has changed to reflect the times. But the imagery has changed little:
Americans in chains. Coughlin fought “the modern industrial slavery” and the “slavery of modern mass production.” Beck says Obama is “moving all of us quickly in slavery” and warns against becoming “a slave to what’s being built in Washington.”
Government sliding into tyranny. Coughlin said Roosevelt was “usurping federal power,” becoming a “financial dictator,” and warned of the “present despotism, which is far more acute than was taxation without representation.” Beck likens Obama administration officials to earlier “tyrants” and “slave owners.”
Guardian of the Constitution. Coughlin saw himself as defender of the nation’s founding document; “the day has arrived when we must expel those who have forgotten our Constitution,” he said. Beck sees his political opposition as “the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution, and it was designed to eat the Constitution.”
Fear of Europe. Coughlin warned of a U.S. government trying to force its people “down to the European standard of living, now that we are determined to accept the European standard of diplomacy and in part at least the European standard of legislation.” Beck sees America “marching down the road to European socialized health care.”
Both men positioned themselves as leader of a movement rather than a mere broadcaster: Coughlin formed the National Union for Social Justice to shape laws and elections; Beck created the 9/12 Project to do the same. Both men claimed the Founding Fathers would support their views. Both favored alternatives to currency—silver for Coughlin, gold for Beck. Both had their demons—Coughlin’s “Bourbons” and “money changers,” and Beck’s “progressives.”
And both proudly took sides in the battle between God and communism: “The apostles of Lenin and Trotsky bid us forsake all rights to private ownership and … [summon] us to worship at the altar where a dictator of flesh and blood is enthroned as our god and the citizens are branded as his slaves.”
Communists, dictators, and slaves: Vintage Beck. Except that last quote was from Coughlin.
CHAPTER 15
SOME OF HIS BEST FRIENDS …
You can take the man out of the Morning Zoo, but you can’t take the Morning Zoo out of the man.
It’s been years since Beck has done a drive-time radio show, but he still saves some of his best material for the morning. It was on Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, that he said he just couldn’t prove that the federal government wasn’t operating a Nazi-style concentration camp in Wyoming. And it was on that same show almost five months later that he uttered the words that would come to define him.
One of the hosts, Steve Doocy, reminded viewers that the White House was about to have a “beer fest” in which Obama would bring together the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the white Cambridge cop who arrested him while he was breaking into his own home. Obama, after too hastily scolding the cops for being “stupid,” wanted to have a “teachable moment” on race.
“That is unbelievable,” Beck said of the planned beer summit.
“Why?”
“That is unbelievable,” the incredulous Beck repeated. Waving his index finger, he continued: “Why? For a teaching lesson? Some sort of a—who needs to learn what here? This person I think has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, I don’t know what it is.”
But Beck did know this: “You can’t sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for twenty years and not hear some of that stuff and not have it wash over. What kind of President of the United States immediately jumps on the police? … Now they’re going to have a beer? That’s obscene.”
Gretchen Carlson, another host, tried to change the subject to whether or not Obama had planned what he was going to say about the incident when asked about it at a news conference.
But Beck was not going to be taken off his theme. He said it didn’t matter if it
was “off the cuff or planned. This guy has a social justice—he is going to set all of the wrongs of past right.”
“But listen,” the third host, Brian Kilmeade, interjected. “You can’t say he doesn’t like white people. David Axelrod is white, Rahm Emanuel his chief of staff is white, I think 70 percent of the people we see every day are white. Robert Gibbs is white.”
Beck only now appeared to be realizing that he had just said something explosive. “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” he replied, having just said exactly that. “I’m saying he has a problem. He has a—this guy is, I believe, a racist.”
So much for qualifying his accusation. Beck, sitting cross-legged in the guest chair, continued on, ranting about an Obama adviser who believes in “black liberation theology. A black nationalist.” He emphasized the word “black.”
The reaction was instantaneous, and unflattering. “ARE YOU SERIOUS????” MSNBC’s morning host, former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, tweeted. “Did Glenn Beck really say the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture’? Outrageous.”
Even Fox executives felt the need to say that Beck wasn’t speaking for the network.
* * *
Beck played the race game when he was on the Morning Zoo (he memorably mocked an Asian American accent), but it became more of a problem as he gained followers.
During one of his radio broadcasts in 2007, Beck observed of rising Democratic star Barack Obama: “He’s very white in many ways … Can I even say that without somebody else starting a campaign saying ‘what does he mean he’s very white.’ He is. He’s very white.”
But that was a racist thing to say—according to Glenn Beck. That same year he scolded Jesse Jackson: “He says Barack Obama is acting white, which is an unbelievable racist statement.”
The previous year, he had Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, as a guest on his CNN program. “You are a Democrat,” he told the congressman. “You are saying, ‘let’s cut and run.’ And I have to tell you, I have been nervous about this interview with you, because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies.’ ”
Added Beck: “And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.”
“I don’t need to prove my patriotic stripes,” the congressman replied.
After Obama was elected, Beck, on his radio show, determined that Americans elected him because of his color. They “were voting for, uh, you know, not change, but change I think in race … They weren’t necessarily for his policies.”
“People said, ‘at least he’s not another old white guy,’ ” chimed in his executive producer.
Though Beck bristles at the idea that such remarks might earn him the “racist” label, he’s often happy to bestow the distinction on others.
Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic woman nominated by Obama to the Supreme Court, uttered “one of the most outrageous racist remarks I have heard,” Beck articulated one night.
Reading her oft-criticized remark that “a wise Latina woman … would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male,” Beck commented, “Gosh, that smacks of racism, but maybe it’s just me.”
Beck’s guest, conservative legal scholar Ed Whelan, dutifully assured the host that it wasn’t just him.
“I don’t like the charges of, ‘oh, you’re a racist,’ ” Beck continued. Unless he’s the one leveling the charge. “I mean, gee. She sure sounds like a racist here,” he added.
And given that the president and his Supreme Court justice are racists, it’s only natural that the nation should reintroduce slavery. He mentioned slavery and slaves some two hundred times in his first year on Fox News:
“I think this president is moving quickly, moving all of us quickly, into slavery. He’s enslaving our children with a debt that they just can never repay.”
“We are enslaved now to China, we’re at China’s whim.”
“Don’t allow yourself to become, or your state to become, a slave to what’s being built in Washington.”
“Progressive policies are keeping these people in slavery—slavery to government, welfare, affirmative action, regulation, control.”
“We have new slaves, illegal immigrants, being used the same by the same people, although conditions are not as bad as they were, but it’s the same damn argument.”
“Rebuking Joe Wilson doesn’t help solve any real race problems or any problems with anything, including the existing slavery that we have with illegal immigration and ACORN.”
“They’ll sell you and your children into slavery in order to do special favors for their cronies.”
“This isn’t a Tree of Liberty anymore. This is slavery. This is slavery.”
How to make sense of all this racism and enslavement? Beck called in Jesse Lee Peterson, a black conservative. “I have to tell you, Glenn, the electing of Barack Obama was about black racism and white guilt,” the minister explained. “White Americans want to make up for past history, slavery, and they have been blamed for what is happening today.”
White people, he reasoned, “think by electing a black socialist liberal, somehow or another, black Americans are going to overcome their racism. But the only thing that is going to change their racism is black folks have to forgive. They have to drop their anger.”
Beck’s racial anger, however, was under no such restriction. Not only did he regard Obama as a racist, he regarded Obama as a racist with a bladder problem. When Obama declined to meet with the CEO of BP, the oil company that caused the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Beck speculated that the snub was because the oil man “is a white CEO.” Around that same time Beck said he was dismayed at Obama’s inclination “to pee all over our allies,” and asserted that “the only thing this president hasn’t done is just urinate on us.”
The census, which asks Americans to identify themselves by race, caused an eruption in Beck’s racial volcano. “Why are they asking this question today?” he asked on his radio show.
“Because minorities are worth more than whites,” replied his producer.
“Exactly right,” Beck informed his listeners. “So you will get more dollars if you are a minority. So you are worth more as a minority.” The conclusion he drew from this: “If you were offended back in 1790 about slavery”—and all of you who were offended in 1790, you know who you are—“do not answer the race question … Today they are asking the race question to try to increase slavery.”
* * *
In his early days on Fox, Beck’s racial worries were mostly about Hispanics. “You’re called a racist for just wanting a fence,” he protested one night. But on his radio show, he found sinister connotations in the president’s name. “You don’t take the name Barack to identify with America,” he said. “You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”
Apparently the neonatal Obama should have raised an objection back in 1961.
Gradually, Beck’s race monologues took a darker turn. In May 2009, he hosted the spokesman for ACORN. After a testy exchange, he returned from a commercial break to announce that he had kicked the ACORN man off the set.
“I thought he said I hate black people,” Beck reported to his viewers.
Actually, a colleague informed Beck, the spokesman said Beck was “afraid” of black people.
Beck then turned to his next guest, the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund: “Are you afraid of black people or do you just hate them, John?”
Then, just before the White House “beer summit” that would cause Beck so much grief, he found a reason for his fear of black people—in particular, one black man named Obama.
“Here’s the one thing tonight,” he declared. “Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health-care bill, [is] transforming America. And
they are all driven by President Obama’s thinking on one idea: Reparations.”
Huh?
Actually, Obama opposed reparations to African Americans—but that, Beck decided, was only because “he doesn’t think reparations would go far enough.” He then began to spar with the straw man: “Three hundred sixty thousand in the Civil War, that wasn’t enough?”
Beck had finally cracked Obama’s secret code. “These massive programs are Obama-brand reparations. Obama is no dummy,” he concluded. “His goal is creating a new America. A new model. A model that will settle old racial scores through new social justice.”
The beer summit loomed, and Beck upped the rhetorical volume as he talked about “radical black nationalism” in the White House and “Marxist black liberation theology” influencing Obama. “We have demonstrated President Obama’s desire for racial justice, but how is he setting out to achieve it?… Through intimidation, vilification, bullying, a system, an underground shell game.”
The next morning, Beck went on Fox & Friends and called Obama a racist with deep-seated hatred for white people, or perhaps white culture.
Liberal activists launched a campaign to persuade Beck’s advertisers to drop the show—and, over time, scores did. Beck went on the radio to denounce “the latest rage in the Glenn Beck tear-him-apart business.”
His “deep-seated hatred” allegation? “I stand by that. I deem him a racist based on really his own standard of racism.”
But as the criticism continued, even from conservatives, Beck began to see himself as a persecuted minority. “It is time to stand up and speak without fear,” he coached his listeners. To help them, he brought in a psychiatrist, Fox News contributor Keith Ablow, and put himself on the couch.
“This is what people have said about me just this week,” Beck told the doctor. “I’m a freak show, a religious nut job, hysterical, a cult leader, a shameless opportunist, a political operative … I’m full of crap—that one. Delusional, hard right, idiotic, thickheaded, spineless coward—I love that. Crybaby—that one they probably have me on. And I’m just a fear-mongering whatever.”
