Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank Read Free Book Online Page A

sobered up, changed wives, and found religion—Beck was searching for an ideology beyond that of the morning zoo. With the help of Senator Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, Beck, then a supporter of abortion rights who wore his hair in a ponytail, enrolled in a religion class at Yale. It was, he recalled, titled “Early Christology: The Making of the Image of Christ.” At the same time, he endeavored to have books replace drinks in his life: He went to bookstores and assembled “the library of a serial killer,” including titles by Alan Dershowitz, the pope, Nietzsche, Hitler, Carl Sagan, Billy Graham, Plato, and Kant.
    As he read philosophy and searched for a church, Beck began to adopt a more conservative persona, on air and off. During the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings of late 1998 and early 1999, he gave his patron Lieberman a copy of John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage to encourage him to vote to convict Clinton. “He was offended,” Beck later recalled. “That was the last time we ever spoke.”
    Beck’s conversion to Mormonism in 1999 coincided with a whole new level of conservative positions. By now he had short hair and at some point along the way acquired what he calls his “relatively new” position of being “staunchly pro-life.” But he didn’t embrace all of the Mormon customs, such as those involving foul language. While still at KC101 in Connecticut a month after his baptism, he hurled obscenities on air at a caller who complained about “people like you and Rush Limbaugh talking about morality and you have none.” Beck told her, “You don’t give a crap about the truth” and called her an “evil little bitch.”
    Beck finally got what he wanted in 2000: a chance to follow radio successes such as Limbaugh into an all-talk format. He got an afternoon radio spot in Tampa and was soon nationally syndicated. Then, as now, his format was about public affairs but often had nothing to do with the news of the day. Writing in 2003 about attending a talk-radio convention, he recalled being bored by the topics the others were talking about: taxes, prescription drugs, party politics, and the presidential campaign. “Does anybody want to hang out with anybody who is excited by that collection of Jack Kevorkian, auto-suicidal C-SPAN material?” Beck asked. “If you can’t interest a roomful of talk-show hosts in partisan politics, you certainly can’t get somebody who lives in Omaha, Nebraska, and works at the Dunkin’ Donuts to listen to it.”
    No, Beck knew that he needed something more dramatic than the news of the day. To become really big in the talk business, he didn’t need to inform his audience. He needed to entertain them, anger them, frighten them. And he found what he needed in his new church.
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    On the morning of July 16, 2009, Beck was on the air for his radio show when he asked his producer, not for the first time, “Can you get the Ezra Taft Benson quote for me?” For listeners, he identified Benson as Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture. He did not disclose that Benson was also the thirteenth president of the Mormon Church, who died five years before Beck’s baptism.
    Beck played the audio of Benson recounting a conversation with Khrushchev in which the Soviet leader told him: “You Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept communism outright, but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of socialism until you’ll finally wake up and find you already have communism.”
    Beck developed Benson’s views into a cornerstone of his own philosophy as he waged war against “progressives” trying to sneak communism into America “step by step,” as he puts it. “Progressivism says, ‘Bit by bit we’ll eat at the Constitution,’ ” Beck informed his viewers. Another day, he described the progressive plan “to rot America from the inside … make progress, baby steps.”
    At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, he