Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (9 page)

It’s also a good thing that Beck taped his promotional video for Goldline before he arrived at Fox. He talked about how the Founding Fathers—a favorite topic on his broadcasts—believed the country was “going to shake apart and there would be troubled times” before it recovered. “I’d like a little bit of insurance. That’s why I want to talk to you about Goldline,” Beck explained over soft music. “If you’re like our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then just know that what’s on the horizon is just temporary and this too shall pass. Here’s the deal. Call Goldline.” He added later, “You want some insurance? Trust the people at Goldline.”

Beck’s constant pitching for Goldline came to the attention of his ideological critics, one of whom, Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner of New York, issued a “report” condemning the gold dealer’s practices: “Goldline Grossly Overcharges for Their Coins”; “Goldline Falsely Claims to Offer ‘Good’ Investments”; “Goldline Salespeople Misrepresent Their Ability to Give ‘Investment Advice’ ”; and “Goldline Formed an Unholy Alliance with Conservative Pundits to Drive a False Narrative.”

Beck responded by creating a new Web site,
WeinerFacts.com
, showing the congressman’s head on a walking hot dog. He went on O’Reilly’s show to respond to Weiner by eating a wiener. O’Reilly said the congressman “is accusing you of being Goldfinger.”

“A lot of wieners do that,” Beck said. He went on to argue that Goldline has an “A-plus credit rating from the Better Business Bureau.”

There’s some dispute about Goldline’s ratings and reputation, but that’s hardly the important point. The problem is not that Beck sends people to a shoddy company. It’s that he frightens his audience into thinking they need to buy gold because an economic Armageddon is approaching—and then they go and buy gold from a company that pays Beck in hard currency.

The regular schmo may not be aware that fellow schmo Beck has such expensive tastes. And the ordinary schlub probably doesn’t know fellow schlub Beck is making a lot of money by scaring him into buying gold.

Advertisers, however, are a bit savvier. And some of the most common brand names in America have fled Beck’s show in a panic—not because they fear an apocalypse, but because they fear the host’s mouth.

The trouble began in the summer of 2009 when Beck determined that President Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” A little-known African American group called Color of Change launched a boycott, and several big advertisers—Walmart, GMAC, Best Buy, CVS, Travelocity, Geico, ConAgra, RadioShack, State Farm, and Procter & Gamble—fell into line.

At first, other advertisers took their place, and Beck supporters pushed back on a Web site called
DefendGlenn.com
. Color of Change claimed it had Fox revenue figures showing a sharp drop for the show, but Fox maintained that it hadn’t lost money because the advertisers merely switched to other Fox shows.

But then Fox’s Carl Cameron reported that Color of Change had been cofounded by White House environmental adviser Van Jones. By coincidence or design, Jones became the focus of a daily attack on Beck’s show. The “self-avowed communist” Jones, with a history of questionable rhetoric that Beck exposed, was pressured within a couple of weeks to quit his White House job.

Just as the boycott over the “racist” accusation was quieting down, Beck found himself in a new dispute with liberal church leaders. As part of his war against “progressives,” Beck told his followers that they should quit their churches if there was any mention of “social justice” or “economic justice” in those houses of worship. “I beg you, look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church Web site. If you find them, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words,” Beck advised. “Am I advising people to leave their church? Yes … If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish.”

In the usual style, Beck embroidered the case against “social justice” and “economic justice” churches with accusations of “socialism, Marxism, communism,” and pronounced that these churchgoing progressives “are not a friend of Jesus Christ.” Of the social justice types in churches, Beck alleged: “The enemy is within our gates.” Calling them “the same people that tried to destroy Christmas,” he said they aim to get into a church and “rot it from the inside.”

This war on social justice was startling to many churchgoers and church officials alike, who had often been using the term for such activities as soup kitchens and medical clinics—not exactly evidence that the churches are rotting from the inside and harboring enemies. Other instances in which this nefarious “social justice” has been invoked through the years have included opposition to slavery and segregation.

The Reverend Jim Wallis, a liberal evangelical, called for another Beck boycott. “When your political philosophy is to consistently favor the rich over the poor, you don’t want to hear about economic justice,” Wallis said of Beck.

Beck, on the air, suggested that the Obama White House was behind the boycotts—a tricky claim to make because Jones had left Color for Change long before the boycott was called and Wallis was not, as Beck alleged, Obama’s “spiritual and political adviser.”

By the spring of 2010,
Washington Post
media critic Howard Kurtz reported that more than two hundred companies had joined the Beck boycott. A few, including Apple, had left Fox entirely. Those at the network acknowledged that they could charge more for advertising if the host wasn’t so radioactive—but, then again, if the host wasn’t so radioactive, the show wouldn’t have so many passionate followers.

Though it was small consolation, Fox was able to find some less august advertisers, such as Goldline, to fill the spots vacated by the big brands. Another of the brands that came to Beck’s rescue was Kaopectate.

CHAPTER 8
GLENN BECK’S LOVE AFFAIR
WITH HITLER

After the Obama administration bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, Glenn Beck invited onto his radio show a couple who lost their car dealership as part of the restructuring. Beck’s thoughts went where they often go: to Nazi Germany.

“This is fascism!” he screamed. “This is what happens when you merge special interests, corporations, and the government. This is what happens. And you know what, guys; if people like you don’t take a stand and I’m not suggesting that you don’t sign or do sign … but at some point, you know what poem keeps going through my mind is ‘First They Came for the Jews.’ People, all of us, are like, well, this news doesn’t really affect me. Well, I’m not a bondholder. Well, I’m not in the banking industry. Well, I’m not a big CEO. Well, I’m not on Wall Street. Well, I’m not a car dealer. I’m not an autoworker. Gang, at some point they’re going to come for you!”

This was a rather unusual rendition of Martin Niemöller’s famous lines about the Holocaust (“First, they came for the socialists …”), but for Beck, it was standard operating procedure. A few months later, he again invoked the Niemöller passage on his radio show, but this time he and his colleagues at Fox News were the Jewish victims being rounded up for extermination. The Gestapo in this case was the Obama White House, which was denying Fox’s interview requests because of its hostile coverage of Obama.

He recommended journalists at other news outlets keep in mind “the old ‘First they came for the Jews and I wasn’t Jewish.’ When you have a question and you believe that something should be asked, they’re totally fine with you right now,” Beck said. “When they’re done with Fox and talk radio, do you really think they’re going to leave you alone if you want to ask a tough question? If you believe that, you should open up a history book because you missed the point of many brutal dictators. You missed the point on how they always start.”

For much of the last seventy years, there has been an unwritten rule followed by both sides in the American political debate: Try to avoid the Hitler accusations. Once you compare your opponent to the Nazis, any form of rational discussion becomes impossible; opponents take offense, and an apology usually follows. Richard Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, gave a tearful apology for likening U.S. treatment of detainees to the Nazis, while Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich climbed down from his claim that Obama is as much of a threat to America as Adolf Hitler.

But Beck, it would seem, has a Nazi fetish. In his first fourteen months on Fox News, he and his guests invoked Hitler 115 times. Nazis, another 134 times. Fascism, 172 times. The Holocaust got 58 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 8 mentions.

Whenever Beck is talking about the president, the risk of a Nazi comparison is high. In September 2009, he was playing an old tape of Obama saying he favors a “single-payer” government-run health-care system. “I am not comparing him to this, but read
Mein Kampf
for this reason,” Beck told his radio listeners. “You see that Hitler told you what he was going to do. He told the Germans.” Not that he’s comparing Obama to this, naturally.

Beck has been on the Nazi beat for some time. Back in 2006, he saw Nazism in Al Gore’s book
An Inconvenient Truth:
“It’s like Hitler. Hitler said a little bit of truth, and then he mixed in ‘and it’s the Jews’ fault.’ That’s where things get a little troublesome, and that’s exactly what’s happening.”

Exactly. That went so well that a year later, he likened Gore’s global warming campaign to the Holocaust:

Now, I’m not saying that anybody’s going to—you know Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government.

The comparison continued as Beck likened the work of global warming scientists to Hitler’s eugenics and building a master race. “You got to have an enemy to fight,” he said. “And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming … And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did.”

The Anti-Defamation League pleaded with Beck to stop. “Glenn Beck’s linkage of Hitler’s plan to round up and exterminate Jews with Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness of global warming is outrageous, insensitive, and deeply offensive,” Abe Foxman said at the time.

But Beck only expanded his fascist fantasies when he moved to Fox News and Obama came to power. In April 2009, he dedicated entire shows to the subject. “The government is crushing our freedom under steel-toe boots,” he began one such show. “Americans on both sides are now saying, ‘You know, haven’t I seen this movie before?’ ” As he said these words, the screen on the set with him showed Nazis marching. “Enough!” Beck shouted, proposing that the “tea parties” and the “9/12 Project,” which he created, oppose the fascists.

“People once again are feeling oppressed by an out-of-control state,” he said, furthering the Obama–Hitler analogy. “They’re going to nationalize our banks, they’re going to put the government in charge of private payrolls, they’re going to move to nationalize our auto industry. And here’s the one key word—using the word ‘crisis’ to obtain the unprecedented power needed to make it all happen.”

Beck, deciding belatedly that the Bush administration, too, had fascist tendencies, continued: “It all adds up to me now having to admit that I was wrong. Our government is not marching down the road towards communism or socialism … They’re marching us to a brand of nonviolent fascism, or to put it another way, they’re marching us towards 1984—‘Big Brother,’ he’s watching.”

“Like it or not, fascism is on the rise,” Beck announced, softening this only a touch by saying, “It’s fascism with a happy face. To those who said fascism is coming under Bush and the people who are saying fascism is coming under Obama: You’re both right!”

Beck brought out his Obama-as-fascist expert. “Fascism sought to control indirectly through the domination of nominally private owners. Would you say that this is what’s happening with GM right now, and AIG?” American companies, Beck said, are behaving as German companies did in “the early days of Adolf Hitler.”

When his guest, libertarian writer Sheldon Richman, tried to offer some cautions, Beck took umbrage. “I am not saying that Barack Obama is a fascist,” he argued, having just outlined a case making that very point. “I’m not saying the Democrats are fascists. I’m saying the government under Bush and under Obama and under all of the presidents that we’ve seen or at least most of the presidents that we’ve seen for quite some time are slowly but surely moving us away from our republic and into a system of fascism.”

He just didn’t get that upset about it when Bush was in office. “Like it or not, fascism is on the rise,” he warned. “The government is a heroin pusher, using smiley-faced fascism to grow the nanny state.” American progressives, he said at another point, “had a love affair” with Mussolini.

Beck drew a direct link between how “Hitler used the world economic crisis as a pivot point” and the words of Obama’s (Jewish) chief of staff Rahm Emanuel: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Beck, with the help of his guests, determined that “there are a lot of similarities” between the current environment and the fall of Weimar Germany. Warning of German-style hyperinflation, he said: “We all know the world is on fire.” He showed images of Hitler, Stalin, and Lenin and asked, “Is this where we’re headed?”

“I’m not predicting that we go down that road,” Beck said, after doing just that. “What I’m talking tonight about is: Destined to Repeat Fascism,” he explained, giving the episode a name. “Whether it’s the temperature in your house, because it’s not good for the planet, all the way to, ‘Well, I’m sorry, you’ve got to go to a camp.’ ” Beck was destined to repeat his fascist accusations, over and over. Touting a book titled
Lenin, Stalin and Hitler
on one show, he asserted: “It’s all happening again. I’m not saying that these people are in our horizon, but let me tell you something: it’s spooky, the similarities.”

He’s not saying, he’s just saying.

Health-care reform, naturally, provided more Nazi linkages. When Walmart joined the fight, Beck commented: “It’s what happened in the national socialist country of Germany in the 1930s under Hitler. These companies get into bed and think, ‘Well, we’re going to be fine. We’ll take just a little bit of this.’ Then they’re trapped.”

When Obama’s advisers made a video to boost support for the reform, Beck saw a Nazi precedent. “Now remember, Goebbels, king of propaganda?” he asked. “This is yet another playbook, page taken right out of the playbook.”

At another point, Beck told his viewers that “when I finish this story, some may believe we’re on the road to the Hitler Youth.” The source of this? A speech by Gore, to children and teens at a youth conference. Recalling that some in his parents’ generation could no longer defend racial segregation, Gore said: “That’s when the laws started to change. There are some things about our world that you know that older people don’t know.”

From this, Beck concluded: “The government and its friends are indoctrinating our children for control of their minds, your freedom, and our choice and our future. It must stop, because history—when properly taught—has already shown us where it leads. This is what Nazi Joseph Goebbels said about the Hitler Youth: ‘If such an art of active mass influence through propaganda is joined with a long-term systematic education of our nation and if both are conducted in a unified and precise way, the relationship between the leadership and the nation will always remain close.’ ”

Beck also found fascism in Obama’s 2008 campaign speech calling for an expansion of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, and the Foreign Service. “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he argued. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

“This is what Hitler did with the SS,” Beck told one of his guests. “He had his own people. He had the brown shirts and then the SS. This is what Saddam Hussein … I mean, I think America would have a really hard time getting their arms around that.”

Moments later, Beck added, “I’m not suggesting anything. I’m asking questions. I don’t know what this means.”

But—what the heck?—why not trot out an SS comparison anyway?

Beck used the occasion of a shooting at the national Holocaust Museum to share his view that “the Germans” during Hitler’s rise “were an awful lot like we are now. We’re kind of living in a denial, like, no, that can’t really be happening.

“All right. The climate change people are pulling a page from Nazis’ Hitler youth.”

Beck brought in the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg, for reinforcement. “What a nightmare this is!” Beck told him. “Can you give me any example in history where this kind of stuff has happened, what’s happening today, and what does it lead to?”

Goldberg could. “I’m not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I’m not calling him Nazis and all the rest,” he began. Right, it always starts this way. “But you know, in fascism, we saw the people’s car. We call it the Volkswagen … Now we’ve got Barack Obama saying that G.M. is going to make these affordable fuel-efficient cars.”

Silly, perhaps, but there was something deft about the constant Obama-as-Nazi allegations. In most cases where anybody hurls “fascist” allegations, it’s usually the left hurling them at the right. Conservatives, meanwhile, hurl the “communist” charge at the left. But Beck found a way around this paradigm. Progressives, he figured, are responsible for both fascism
and
communism. Conservatives, by contrast, are the opponents of both.

“The reason why I bring up Hitler so much,” he told his Nazism-saturated viewers one night, “is because what he did—many of the things had their roots, their seeds here in America. The biggest example is eugenics, which led to extermination camps. This was a progressive idea … The Nazi eugenic idea evolved naturally into the eventual Holocaust and the deaths of six million Jews.”

Goldberg was back as a guest, to explain that Hitler’s “social agenda was for expanding universal access to health care, for expanding access to education. It was for [a] cradle to grave welfare state.” That, and making lamp shades from human skin.

“Fascism and communism are the same,” Beck deduced. In fact, “sometimes, it’s hard to tell Hitler and Marx apart.”

Particularly because, as far as Beck’s viewers can tell, they both now live in the White House.