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

asked the audience, “What’s the difference” between a communist and a progressive? “Well, there’s no difference except one requires a gun and the other does it slowly, piece by piece, eating away at it,” Beck explained, channeling Benson.
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    Beck’s embrace of Mormon political thinkers actually begins with a Roman Catholic: the late Carroll Quigley, Bill Clinton’s mentor at Georgetown University. An otherwise reputable academic, Quigley became celebrated among conspiracy types for a brief passage in his 1966 tome, Tragedy & Hope , in which he described the workings of the so-called Round Table Group.
    “There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network,” he wrote. He described a web of organizations including the Council on Foreign Relations and J.P. Morgan & Co., and said that “this elaborate, semi-secret organization” aimed to “coordinate the international activities,” and had behind it “the power of the international financial coterie.”
    Quigley’s words, which get some credit for launching the One World Government conspiracy, inspired many conspiracy theorists who came to influence Beck’s views quite directly. But Quigley’s original allegation had an effect on Beck as well.
    “Let me take you back to right after 9/11,” Beck told his viewers one night. “I was a really lazy American. I didn’t know much about American history. I didn’t know anything about anything really … I started to read everything I could get my hands on. One of the books I found was this one, Tragedy & Hope .”
    Beck said Quigley had “a better idea than the doomsday device or MAD” (the cold-war nuclear strategy of mutually assured destruction). “Instead of tying everybody to a master computer that showed that we’re going to blow everything up, they decided to tie everybody’s economies together … Mutually assured economic destruction, OK? No weapons involved—just money, tie it all together.”
    Another time, Beck told radio listeners: “I know it’s not popular to quote Carroll Quigley but if you’ve ever read Tragedy & Hope from the 1960s, you see this being played out.” And what was being “played out”? There exists, he argued, a “shadow government” in which the Democratic and Republican parties are identical, both secondary to the “companies taking over and really controlling everything.”
    Interesting. But this resembles not in the least what Quigley was describing. Rather, Beck had embraced an interpretation of Quigley—a misinterpretation, Quigley himself said—by Cleon Skousen, who wrote a book, The Naked Capitalist , based on Quigley’s Tragedy & Hope . “Skousen is apparently a political agitator. I am an historian,” Quigley protested in a Mormon journal called Dialogue . Quigley had described a loose international organization aimed at improving economies; Skousen turned this into a nefarious plot to control the world. Beck embraced the latter.
    Actually, Beck had embraced all things Skousen—particularly a book he had written called The 5,000 Year Leap , asserting that the Founders were moved by biblical law to write the Constitution. Skousen’s nephew Mark Skousen appeared on Beck’s show and recounted the episode in the conservative magazine Human Events :
    “Last Friday, Beck passed out to the live audience a new edition of The 5,000 Year Leap , with an introduction by him. He told the audience, ‘Everyone should read this book.’ Between commercials, he told me that even though he had never met my uncle (he died in 2006), Cleon’s book changed his life. He said that a friend, without solicitation, sent him a copy of The 5,000 Year Leap , saying, ‘Glenn, I don’t know if you’ve ever read this, but it’s the simplest, easiest way for Americans of all ages to understand the simple yet brilliant principles our founders based this country on.’ Glenn read the book, and concluded: ‘The author was years