by Dana Milbank
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.
CHAPTER 9
WOODROW WILSON, SPAWN OF SATAN
Just listen to the words Glenn Beck has been directing at the president:
“This is an evil SOB, man.”
“One evil SOB—bad dude!”
“I mean, he’s a dirtbag racist, is he not?”
“I hate this guy. I don’t even want to show his picture. No, don’t do it. Don’t show it. I hate this guy.”
“The biggest racist president [who] ever served.”
“He was a horror show, wasn’t he? A horror show, possibly the spookiest president we’ve ever had.”
This is the sort of thing that might make the Secret Service worried about their protectee. But in this case, they can stand down: The president Beck is talking about died eighty-six years ago.
Beck’s peculiar obsession with Woodrow Wilson is of recent origin. “I mean, I got to tell you, two years ago, I knew nothing about Woodrow Wilson,” he told his viewers. That, evidently, remains the case.
But Beck did read a conservative historian’s book about the twenty-eighth president, and the Fox News host decided to blame Wilson for just about everything bad in the world today—including Barack Obama, born thirty-seven years after Wilson died.
Beck advertised this theme on his very first show on Fox, promising to tell viewers “what tactic Obama [is] borrowing from Woodrow Wilson” and that other ne’er-do-well, FDR, “to make sure his agenda gets pushed right straight through.”
As promised, Beck was on the next night, venting his full fury at poor Woodrow. “A president I never really learned about in school at all, Woodrow Wilson—what an SOB this guy was!” he began.
Had he paid attention in school, Beck would have learned that Wilson was a conservative (!) political science professor and president of Princeton before he became New Jersey governor and then president in 1912. This was the “Progressive Era” in America, a period from about 1891 to 1921, and Wilson, like figures in both political parties in those days, ran on a progressive platform.
And that is why Beck hates him.
The Progressive Era was the time of muckrakers and such things as the struggle to abolish child labor, break up monopolies, clean up meat-processing plants, and give women the right to vote. For Beck, this was a very dark time in our nation’s history.
The Progressive Era may have ended ninety years ago, but for Beck it still haunts. “As I study history,” the erudite host proclaims, “I see that a lot of the problems—most of the problems, in fact—stem from Woodrow Wilson and the progressive movement.” Progressivism, he says, is “the cancer,” the movement behind both Nazism and communism, a creed under which “people are secondary to the Earth and animals,” a group of people who are “full-fledged eugenic racists,” barbarians who “will cheat. They will lie. They will steal. And they have, in the past, blown things up if it helps them to win.”
Those who call themselves “progressives” today have little in common with the Progressive Era of a century ago; it’s largely a term liberals adopted for themselves after Republicans turned the word “liberal” into an epithet during the 1980s. Beck, however, was determined to draw a straight line from capital-P Progressives to modern-day progressives—a labor he undertook with great dedication from the moment of his arrival at Fox.
“Woodrow Wilson took Uncle Sam and that cartoon and tried to get America to cozy up to government power,” he told his viewers on January 30, 2009. Realizing some might view this hundred-year-old history lesson as a little nutty, he added: “Are you regretting your decision to watch this show yet because all of a sudden, you’re like, ‘Why is he talking about Woodrow Wilson?’ Hang on, I got a point here.”
His point: Woodrow Wilson tried to make Uncle Sam look “kind of like Bernie Madoff, okay?”
Okay, Glenn.
Two weeks later, Beck was back, reporting that he had read more about the twenty-eighth president over the weekend. His conclusion remained: “Woodrow Wilson was a nightmare.”
This was getting tedious. He waited two months before returning to the subject, this time inviting a conservative Wilson scholar to the show. “Woodrow Wilson and FDR captured the Democrats for this progressive movement and took us fundamentally off the tracks that our founders had built and moved us into another direction. True or false?”
“Very true,” the author answered.
But how? “You get the progressives on both sides who brought you the income tax, forced sterilization of the inmates, eugenics, Prohibition,” Beck later explained.
Wilson actually vetoed the Volstead Act, which was written to enforce Prohibition. But no matter. Beck was unstoppable in his anti-Wilson war. He even found a way to blame Wilson for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—twenty years after Wilson left office and seventeen years after his death.
“You want to know why they bombed us? It didn’t come out of the blue. You know why? Because Woodrow Wilson told England you need to align yourself with us and not Japan. And so we humiliated Japan.” Beck’s unassailable conclusion: “The Progressives started it, then pretended it was a big surprise.”
It was probably the most creative reading of twentieth-century history since Animal House. Remember when Bluto asks his fraternity brothers: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!”
“Germans?” asks Otter.
“Forget it, he’s rolling,” says Boon.
“And it ain’t over now,” Bluto concludes. “ ’Cause when the going gets tough, the tough get going.”
Beck, too, was rolling—although his version of Bluto’s phrase once came out on air like this: “We’re Americans. When the tough gets going, that’s when we usually arrive.”
Whatever.
One conclusion at which Beck had clearly arrived was that Wilson was to blame for all manner of problems. “Under Woodrow Wilson,” he announced one night, “we have 30,000 people put in jail during World War I for speaking out.” He came back later in the show to say the number was actually “2,000, 3,000 people.” Actually, more like 1,100 were jailed or fined under the Sedition Act of 1918, which was indeed a stain on Wilson’s presidency. But among those imprisoned was Eugene Debs—the Socialist Party leader. Why would progressives, who supposedly wanted to lead the country toward socialism, jail the most prominent Socialist of the day?
Beck left that mystery unsolved. He was too busy finding Wilson’s evil fingerprints elsewhere—even in Obama’s use of policy “czars” in the White House. “The presidents have had czars for a long time. Woodrow Wilson, he was spooky,” pronounced Beck. “Woodrow Wilson, he was a progressive just like this president. He talked about, you know, ways to get things done by going around Congress … Guess what? This is a progressive i
n the White House. That’s what he’s doing. He’s going right around Congress. When are you going to wake up, Congress?”
Aha! Beck had begun to place the Wilsonian noose around the Obamian neck. Finally, on September 18, 2009, he found a tree for the hanging—the “Tree of Revolution.” The host illustrated this tree on his ubiquitous chalkboard, which he uses to help viewers understand his points when they become too convoluted, which is most of the time.
“I’m going to show you something that I think will help tie everything that we’ve been talking about for the past few months, tie it all together,” Beck said, introducing the tree on the chalkboard.
The tree looked to be a sturdy oak. Buried in the ground where the trunk sat was Woodrow Wilson. To the left of Wilson, also in the roots of the tree, was Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary. To the right of Wilson was Saul Alinsky, the late social radical.
Wilson, along with Che and Alinsky, were the Miracle-Gro of the Tree of Revolution.
Farther up the trunk was SDS—Students for a Democratic Society, the 1960s group that protested the Vietnam War. Above SDS were the words “Cloward and Piven.” This rather obscure reference was to two Columbia University academics who in 1966 wrote a Nation magazine article that Beck finds objectionable.
On the left branch of the tree were the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the ACORN community group, represented, appropriately enough, by an acorn. On the right branch of the tree were Bill Ayers, Obama’s “terrorist” pal; Van Jones, an Obama adviser Beck had just driven to resign; and something called “the Apollo Alliance.” Beneath that—a low-hanging fruit?—was Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett.
Now it started getting complicated. Jeff Jones, who with Bill Ayers was part of the Weather Underground, is an adviser to Apollo—where Van Jones used to work! And Jeff and Van have the same last name—Jones!
Various dollar bills were pasted to the branches on the chalkboard, forming leaves. “All these places where there are dollar bills, George Soros has his hands in it,” Beck explained.
Beck began to unveil more elements of the conspiracy shown on the Tree of Revolution:
The Apollo Alliance, funded by George Soros, wrote Obama’s stimulus bill! Apollo’s Jeff Jones, along with Obama friend Bill Ayers, “came right from SDS,” which is “code language for Marxism,” and formed the Weather Underground, responsible for “blowing up the Pentagon”! (Actually, the group blew up a bathroom, but still …). ACORN founder Wade Rathke is connected to SEIU because “his brother Dale is at SEIU, we think.” (SEIU denies this, and there is no evidence for it, but stay with him.) The whole bunch of them were inspired by Richard Cloward and Frances Piven, who wanted to “get everyone on welfare, just start racking up the bills so the American financial system would eventually collapse.”
“Look who the president has!” an agitated Beck continued, following the chalkboard tree trunk. “Wade Rathke, right up the tree! Dale [Rathke], right up the tree! Bill Ayers, right up the tree! Jeff Jones, right up the tree!”
It was brilliant. In summary, Woodrow Wilson mated with an Argentine revolutionary and a Chicago radical, gave birth to a 1960s antiwar group and a pair of Columbia academics, who in turn spawned ACORN, the SEIU, the Apollo Alliance, the Weather Underground, George Soros, and Barack Obama!
The implications were astounding! Woodrow Wilson is Obama’s grandfather! Obama’s cousins bombed the Pentagon! Valerie Jarrett is George Soros’s sister! And the White House has been taken over by South American revolutionaries!
“We’ve told you that these are radicals,” Beck announced as he outlined this airtight case. “We’ve told you that there are communists, Marxists, revolutionaries all around this president.”
And it’s all Wilson’s fault for being the fertilizer of the Tree of Revolution. No wonder Beck was so mad at him.
Beck continued his attack. “Our kids are still being taught that Woodrow Wilson and FDR were these lovable presidents who were so great,” he complained the next month. “Woodrow Wilson was the biggest racist president [who] ever served.”
By January 2010, Beck wasn’t just accusing Wilson’s progeny of planting bombs; he fingered Wilson himself as the bomber. “I saw what they set up,” he told viewers. “They started a hundred-year time bomb. They planted it in the early 1900s, mainly with this guy, Woodrow Wilson, one evil SOB, bad dude! … He thought the American people were just too stupid to understand. Does any of this sound like today?”
The similarities between Obama and Wilson became unmistakable—to Beck.
“I haven’t seen anything in American history like what is being played out right now unless I go back to the early twentieth century with Woodrow Wilson and the early progressive movement … Prohibition, the Fed, income tax, and the power grab that happened around 1915. True or false?”
“True,” said Beck’s obliging guest, author Thomas Sowell. This was the correct answer.
“Correct me if I’m wrong in any of this. The progressives love dictators … and most importantly, they were also for eugenics, which led to the Holocaust.”
“Absolutely,” said the guest. Right again!
Wilson’s progressives went to ground, Beck argued, then suddenly reemerged decades later. “While this country has been asleep, we have been co-opted. There are now more than eighty members of the Progressive Caucus.”
Beck called in an expert for confirmation. “You’ve talked to me more about the progressive movement, which is the disease,” Beck said. “Would you agree it is the disease?”
“It is the disease,” the guest dutifully agreed. “They saw the Constitution as a roadblock to their grand designs for bigger government and they set about to dismantle it beginning with Woodrow Wilson.”
“If you look at Woodrow Wilson,” another guest offered, “you can draw a straight line intellectually … to Barack Obama today.”
The list of Wilson’s evils was long. His high taxes caused a depression. And, decades before George W. Bush was even born, Wilson lied in order to coerce the nation into war. “Woodrow Wilson ran for reelection and he just barely won. And he said we’re never going to go to war in Europe. Lo and behold, just a few months later, World War I!”
Didn’t that have something to do with Germany sinking American ships? Never mind. Just stay with him.
The real point, Beck argued, is this: “Today is 1917.”
Accordingly, Americans had better brush up on their history. “I know you’re busy,” he pleaded with his viewers in March 2010. “The last thing you want to do is pick up a book and read about Woodrow Wilson—I hate this guy … But you’re going to have to. You’re going to have to learn history.”
But for those who really don’t have time, there’s always the chalkboard. “Chalkboard, Tree of Revolution,” Beck reminded viewers, turning to his arboreal diagram. “Look here, above Woodrow Wilson! SDS—this is where Bill Ayers came from, Van Jones, Dale Rathke, Wade Rathke. This was—this was, ‘Let’s blow things up,’ and then Cloward and Piven said, ‘No, no, no, let’s try to just collapse the system …’ ”
In the Tree of Revolution, Beck was again out on a limb.
CHAPTER 10
SCALPS
To those who doubt the power of Beck, two words provide ample refutation: Van Jones.
When forty-year-old Anthony “Van” Jones was named an adviser in the White House Council on Environmental Quality, few took notice. His appointment to the midlevel position was announced in a written statement by the CEQ director and kissed off in a 101-word brief by the Associated Press. The dispatch said Jones founded an “organization that promises environmentally friendly jobs to help lift people out of poverty” and was author of “the New York Times bestseller The Green Collar Economy.”
That was true. But what it didn’t mention—and what Obama White House officials didn’t know—was that Jones had once been a communist. It wasn’t a secret; Jones had been quite outspoken about it before changing his ways several y
ears earlier. Obama aides figured the position was too junior to merit screening and vetting.
That was a big mistake.
Four months after Jones started work at the White House, he was discovered by Beck. Jones’s ordeal began on July 23, 2009, as Beck was making the dubious proposition that everything Obama does is part of an effort to exact reparations for slavery. Beck then took viewers on a circuitous path that arrived at the door of Jones.
“Obama’s new green czar, Van Jones, this is a guy who is a self-avowed communist, and he is in the Obama administration,” Beck explained. “He spent six months in jail, came out a communist. Then he was a communist-anarchist radical. And then he decided—he found the eco-movement—and decided green is the new red. He then went on to become a green expert.”
Some things Beck said were true, and some were complete fiction, but there was no way to know at the moment, because nobody had ever heard of Van Jones. Beck quickly moved on to a denunciation of green jobs, but the fun with Jones had only just begun.
Just five days after this first bite at Jones, Beck made his infamous claim that Obama has a “deep-seated hatred” for white people. As previously detailed, this led a group called Color of Change, cofounded by none other than Van Jones, to call for an advertiser boycott. The fact that Jones had left the group long before didn’t seem to matter to Beck, who, a couple of weeks after the boycott began, went after Jones with new fervor.
Since then, Beck has rarely gone a week without mentioning Jones, and on average mentions him at least daily. In just over nine months (into the spring of 2010) Beck and his TV interlocutors invoked the name Van Jones an incredible 435 times. Long after Jones quit the White House in September 2009—driven out by Beck—he remained in Beck’s view of the world as a central player in Obama conspiracies. Jones was a perfect villain for Beck: a man—a black man!—with proven ties to Obama and a long paper trail in radical politics. Best of all, he was unknown to the public, so—unlike Obama—Beck could define him any way he chose.