You can say this for Glenn Beck: He's charismatic, he was right on ACORN and Van Jones, and he's correct to point out that the government in Washington doesn't work for the common good. The affable Beck articulates the legitimate anger and frustration millions of Americans feel when faced by the fact that the country is in a hot mess of trouble.
But here's the thing: Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose worldview is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon political guru named W. Cleon Skousen. Before signing up as a recruit in Beck's army, conservative Becketeers had better think long and hard about where their affable leader is taking them.
A few weeks back, the red-hot Fox News Channel phenom spent nine minutes on the air leading a seminar on public artwork in New York City. By the time he was finished, Beck had illuminated a propaganda conspiracy linking communists, fascists, the Soviet Union, the Rockefeller family and the United Nations. This is the sort of weirdo rant you expect to encounter on fringey Web sites. You don't expect to see it on national television.
But that's a big part of Beck's shtick. He's always carrying on about sinister Obamaite conspiracies threatening to overthrow the constitutional order. On the Fox & Friends morning show, Beck declared: "The Manchurian Candidate couldn't destroy us faster than Barack Obama. If you were planning a sleeper to come in and become president of the United States, this is how he would do it."
How is it that a man can call the American president a traitorous subversive and not be laughed, or booed, off the national stage? He's a happy-go-lucky Howard Beale. Paddy Chayefsky, you should have lived to see this moment.
Beck's paranoia doesn't come from nowhere. His man Skousen was a fanatical Mormon reactionary so far to the right that the Latter-day Saints church finally felt compelled to distance itself from his teaching.
Beck, an enthusiastic Mormon convert, pushes Skousen's 1981 book, The 5,000 Year Leap, a tendentious pseudo-history of the United States that interprets the founding in religious terms. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recommended it at the recent Values Voter Summit in Washington. And if the pious nationalism of that book were all you knew about Skousen, you would be hard-pressed to see what the big deal was.
But Skousen wrote many less anodyne books about politics – and held views far darker than revealed in the hokey but harmless Leap. In a 1976 lecture, the audio of which is available on the pro-Skousen site AwakeAndArise.org, Skousen rails like an Old Testament prophet, quoting Mormon scriptures and detailing how Satan is working with "secret combinations" – a Mormon theological term – within political parties, churches, labor unions and the wealthy elite, especially the Rockefeller family, to bring about the "One World Order."
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Rod Dreher will be on the show Tuesday at 6:08AM CT.