by Dana Milbank
Even something as simple as a census questionnaire leads to a home invasion. Beck, refusing to fill out his census form completely, warned those census workers who might come to his door in search of the missing information: “Have a good time trying to get past the dogs and the gates. Enjoy that, enjoy that.” Laughing, he added: “I don’t suggest you climb over the walls. The dogs are really, really hungry. You’ve been warned. Don’t step on the property. Guard dogs—and other things.”
On the air, Beck fancies himself being stalked by those he targets on the show, including former White House adviser Van Jones (“If I’m found dead in the streets it’s either Van Jones or Imus,” he told radio host Don Imus), the voter registration organization ACORN (“If I’m ever in a weird accident or a suicide or something, after the media’s done celebrating, could they check into it?”), and the head of the service employees union (“I hope he doesn’t break my legs or have my legs broken”).
In the paranoid mind, enemies lurk in every nook and cranny. So, too, on The Glenn Beck Show.
One day, Beck informed his followers that he was being “targeted by those who are in the Oval Office with the president.”
Another day he said he expects “dogs and firehoses” to be used against him and his followers. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head.”
Another day, he said they were reading his e-mails. “I do believe the government could be reading mine,” he said. “During the Bush administration somebody told me, who would have access to know, I have a file. I can guarantee you I have got a file at least at the White House now.”
Terrorist watch list? Gitmo waiting list?
Even automotive safety has been seen as a possible vehicle with which big government could attack Beck. Take the “OnStar” system, which can remotely disable a stolen car’s engine. But when the government took ownership in General Motors, this technology acquired a sinister meaning. “Our government is starting to consume everything and control everything,” Beck told radio listeners. “Do you want the government to be able to know where you are in your car all the time, also be able to have a microphone in your car?”
On March 9, 2010, Beck had on his TV show the disgraced Democratic congressman Eric Massa, who had just resigned from Congress as allegations emerged of sexual advances he had made on male staffers. Ostensibly, Beck had Massa on to dish dirt on the Democrats, but instead the host wound up vying with his guest in a persecution contest. As Massa tried to outline his troubles, Beck broke in with “bullcrap, sir,” using an expression apparently exempt from the Mormon edict against profanity. “Listen to me … Do you realize my family is at stake? Do you realize—excuse me, sir.”
“So is mine,” Massa volleyed.
“Excuse me for a second, sir,” Beck continued. “My family is at stake. You’ve got a little scandal with your children in college. I’ve got one for all time now, because I’m not going to resign. I’m not going to back down. I have come to a place where I believe, at some point, the system will destroy me.”
If anything’s going to destroy Beck, it’s his own mouth. But it’s more mysterious to say it will be the “system.” Which “they” operate.
Of course, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean “they” aren’t out to get you. When a collection of liberal groups gained some traction in their effort to persuade advertisers to drop Beck because he called Obama a racist, Beck saw in it another conspiracy.
“Has someone decided that they must destroy my career and silence me because we’ve stumbled onto something?” he asked. “Has there ever been a case in American history, outside of the hard-core radical progressive Woodrow Wilson, where an American president and administration tried to destroy the livelihood of a private citizen with whom they disagree? Can’t think of any.”
Beck argued that this is “the same thing” as Nixon’s enemies list, and likened it to Nazis rounding up Jews, citing, as he often does, Martin Niemöller’s description of the Gestapo: “First, they came for the socialists …” Asked Beck: “What is that poem? First they came for the Jews and I stayed silent?”
There’s “they” again. And Beck, German by ethnicity, likes playing the Jew in this scenario. “There is going to be a witch hunt—I believe, in this country, and possibly around the world—for two groups,” he informed his audience another day. “The first group, Jews—it happens every time. Second group, I think, conservatives.”
So if you believe “they” in the government are trying to silence if not kill you, it would be quite understandable to be upset about it. This is where Beck acknowledges he does “have something in common” with Howard Beale, the unstable anchorman from the 1976 film Network who tells viewers the world is falling apart and urges them: “Get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ ”
“That’s the way I feel,” Beck told his Fox viewers. “I do wonder every night why you are not out your window just crying out and saying I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Beck finds it inexplicable that people might interpret such actions as a sign of mental-health problems. “The media seems to be painting a picture of anyone who is worried enough to prepare for the future as crazy. Call them crazy. I’m crazy. You’re crazy. We’re all crazy together,” he went on. “People now—starting in the media—tell you, ‘Oh, you can’t trust that Glenn Beck, he’s crazy,’ or I have something to gain, or I’m just a Republican hack in disguise. The obvious insinuation is—if you’re watching this television show every night—you’re one of those three as well.”
What a crazy thought.
Some would call Beck crazy for ranking, in his list called “Top Ten Bastards of All Time,” Franklin Roosevelt and Tiger Woods as more evil than Pol Pot, and Keith Olbermann more evil than Hitler. But maybe that was just good marketing for his book Arguing with Idiots.
Some would call Beck crazy for having on his show an actor dressed up in Colonial garb and pretending he is Thomas Paine while reading the words of Beck himself. The Paine impersonator listed the economic stimulus legislation as the equivalent of Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center attack. But maybe that was just good television.
Beck will frequently pepper his thoughts with a “maybe I’m crazy” disclaimer. “Maybe I’m crazy for going down this road,” he said after suggesting that Obama was attempting to enslave teenagers. “Maybe I’m crazy, and people say I am,” he said before suggesting that the federal government aimed to take over states. “I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time,” he said on CNN one night in 2006, discussing an evangelical minister’s sex scandal.
The paranoia inevitably came to the attention of Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart did an extended imitation of Beck before the chalkboard.
“Believing there should be a minimum standard for how much lead can be in our paint might lead to the government having the right to sterilize and kill Jews,” Stewart/Beck declared. “I’m not saying that might be the case—I’m saying that’s the case!”
“Follow me, America!” Stewart shouted, impersonating the standard opening for Beck’s show. “Why am I the only one saying it?” he continued. “Am I crazy, or …” Stewart trailed off. “Okay,” he said.
Stewart, at the chalkboard, followed Beck’s circles, which purported to link America with Europe, then Russia, then China. “It’s so ingenious it almost doesn’t make any sense whatsoever,” Stewart/Beck said, then later summarized the Beck worldview: “If you subscribe to an idea, you also subscribe to that idea’s ideology, and to every possible negative consequence that holding that ideology applies when you carry it to absurd extremes. For instance, progressives, if you believe in a minimal safety net for the nation’s neediest, you believe in total and absolute government control.”
Then Stewart turned the philosophy against its creator: “If you believe that faith provides a strong
moral template for our nation’s foundation, it can only lead to totalitarian theocracy.” With that, he drew more Beckian circles on the board and pasted up a photo of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
“That was hysterical,” Beck reported on his show the next night about Stewart’s parody. “He’s saying that I’m crazy and all of this kind of stuff.”
But Beck isn’t crazy. Crazy is just part of his repertoire. If there was any doubt about this, it should have been dispelled way back in November 2006, when Beck took a call on his radio show accusing him of racism.
“Let me just, wait wait, Rod,” he told the caller. “I’m not just going to let you throw down these race cards because obviously you’re somebody who likes to throw the race card and you don’t even understand what the race card is,” Beck said calmly.
The caller also wasn’t pleased with Beck’s joke about wishing a nuclear explosion in France. “I stand by that,” Beck said.
The caller began to retreat from his accusation—“all right, so if I’m wrong”—but Beck had plans for him.
“Oh, you know what? I’m not even going to tolerate this anymore, Rod. Because you, obviously, sir—” Beck began calmly. Then, suddenly, he erupted. “GET OFF MY PHONE!! … Do I want to vaporize France? AS MUCH AS I WANT TO VAPORIZE YOU!!” Beck was leaning forward in his chair, waving his arms madly and shrieking. “You’re lucky I don’t have some sort of equipment where I could vaporize you right now because I’d keep pushing the button over and over and over and over and over again!” Beck calmed momentarily, and said, “Now that, sir, is what I would call comedy. Do I really want to vaporize you?” Beck returned to his screaming: “YES I DO!!”
Beck flipped on his theme music, then leaned back in his chair. He was perfectly calm, and wearing an enormous grin. Still smiling, he took a swig from the bottle in front of him. The fury, the violent talk, the shouting—in short, the craziness? All for show.
CHAPTER 6
A HEMORRHOID ON THE BODY POLITIC
Countless people have considered Glenn Beck to be a pain in the ass. But for once, he was the one with a sore bottom.
“I’m just at home, and I’m recovering from some surgery that was scheduled and then went horribly awry,” Beck, stubbly-faced, his head on a pillow, said to the camera for a video that was posted on his Web site. “I said on the way to the hospital, if I die, God forbid this makes it into the paper. I want to make sure this is not the way I’m remembered.”
Understandably. Beck nearly met his end because of botched hemorrhoid surgery.
Just after Christmas 2007, he was admitted to a hospital for outpatient surgery on his rear end, but then woke up on the operating table. The painkillers were so intense they impaired his breathing. He went home, only to return a couple of hours later to the emergency room, where he found the service most unacceptable. He needed a catheter because he couldn’t urinate, and wound up spending five days in the hospital in a narcotics-induced haze. He found the hospital staff—MSNBC viewers, perhaps—to be rude and generally unconcerned about his pain and suffering.
When he got home, he began to plan a multimedia assault on the American health-care system. “Don’t talk to me about health care,” he wrote on his Web site. “Don’t talk to me about HMOs. Don’t talk to me about anything else. Don’t talk to me about how you need a new CAT scan. Don’t talk to me about how you need a new facility. Talk to me about how you could have a hospital full of people that don’t see people in pain.”
He discussed the gory details: “Your bladder usually holds about 400 ccs. My bladder, when they finally emptied it, was 1,500.” He spoke of hopelessness: “By Saturday night I was ready to kill myself.”
Overall, he said in his video, “it was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life to receive health care in the United States today in not one of our more glorious medical institutions, even though I live in a very nice area. This hospital … was phenomenal, phenomenally bad.” Beck had no mercy for the capitalists running this cruel place. “I have some stories that will melt your brain. And hopefully will melt the brain of the CEO of this hospital, to wake him up to find out what’s going on and it should be a wake-up call to all of us, because this is one of the hospitals where the president of GE is going. If they don’t care about the president of GE, you really think they care about schlubs that are just average working stiffs?”
Beck sounded like a changed man. “I think it really opened my eyes,” he told his followers. “Join me for my new perspective on life, our health-care system, and blood shooting from places blood should not shoot out of,” he said, teasing his upcoming show.
Beck was still on CNN. In January 2008, he went back on the air and spoke of his “personal voyage through the nightmare that is our health-care system.” He began the show by saying: “No matter how much the health-care system would try to keep me down, I’m back … Getting well in this country could actually almost kill you.”
For those not paying attention, Beck filled them in. “It was butt surgery. I had surgery on my ass.” He said he had seen the health-care system “at its very worst.” He complained that he was “nothing more than a number,” and “I felt like I was at a DMV.” He acknowledged that “we do have a health-care crisis in this country,” even if he didn’t think the government or the insurance companies could fix it.
The next day, Beck was on Good Morning America with a similar message. “Let’s emphasize the word ‘care’ in health care,” he proposed.
Alas, it seems that this was the painkillers talking.
Within mere months, Beck had forgotten his complaints about the health-care system. In June 2008, he played a clip of Barack Obama campaigning for the White House with a promise for health-care reform: “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick.”
Retorted Beck: “America already has the best health care in the world. We do take care of our sick.”
Never mind that “nightmare that is our health-care system.” Beck now boasted that the United States was the place where “anybody who’s sick and wealthy in the world” comes. “You’re about to lose the best health-care system in the world,” he told his viewers. He saw no reason to “spend $1 trillion to overhaul the best health-care system in the world.”
“The best health-care system in the world and you’re going to change it?” he demanded. “Republicans, call their bluff!”
As it happens, Beck was about to have another experience inside the best health-care system in the world. He was doing his daily radio broadcast one day in November 2009 when he began to complain on air that he wasn’t feeling well. He left the show and went to a Manhattan hospital, where he underwent surgery for appendicitis. There were no complications this time—outside of The Daily Show, that is, on which Stewart gave Beck a taste of his own medicine.
“This appendix thing is not an isolated incident!” the comedian said, adding that “the stakes are nothing less than Glenn Beck’s internal organs!”
After some Beckian weeping, Stewart went on: “I’m just a concerned American citizen like you questioning what’s going on inside Glenn Beck, and if you don’t get these answers, you ask again and again and again! Because you know who else didn’t answer medical questions? Hitler.”
And that was before the conspiracy against Glenn Beck’s health claimed another victim: his eyesight. In July 2010 he told followers that he had an eye condition called macular dystrophy, and “could go blind in the next year.”
It was tricky to parody Beck, because Stewart could come up with nothing more outlandish than things Beck himself had said in earnest. He had, for example, presented an extended comparison between Obama’s health-care plan and Nazi efforts to build a master race.
It began even before the health-care push. “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending money on embryonic stem cell research,” he said after Obama lifted the ban on such federal research. “Remember, those g
reat progressive doctors are the ones who brought us eugenics … In case you don’t know what eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person … The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening. So I guess I have to put my name on yes, I hope Barack Obama fails.”
It was a slippery-slope argument greased with Crisco. “When we put science in front of ethics,” Beck reasoned, “we start having a bunch of people walking around, especially progressive scientists, walking around in little white coats and talking about—hey, we can make the master race?”
When Democrats began to float their health-care proposals, there was no mention of eugenics, but Beck was not fooled. “What does this new health-care system that they’re trying to push through in the middle of the night have to do with eugenics? The seed, the germ,” he explained.
The seed was planted. Beck cultivated it regularly. In August 2009, as lawmakers’ “town-hall” meetings were exploding in anger over health-care reform, Beck gave the demonstrators plenty to be angry about.
“You have three people in the White House that are in love with eugenics or whatever it is you would call it today,” Beck informed his radio listeners. “Please, dear God, read history. Please, dear God, read the truth of what these people have said in their own words, and ask yourself this one question: Do you trust these people enough to give them control over who lives and who dies?”
A few nights later, Beck was detailing the supposedly pro-eugenics views. One of the guilty was the head of regulatory policy, Cass Sunstein. His offense? “One of his good friends,” an academic named Peter Singer, wrote an article titled “Why We Must Ration Health Care.” Never mind that Sunstein himself hadn’t said any such thing: Guilt by association was evidence enough in Beck’s court.