Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America

by Dana Milbank

  And now to his point: “Barack Obama has galvanized the country, because of the sheer size of the bills he has proposed, and the number of the bills, the urgency that he has been placing on the bills. He has forced us to think and get involved. We have not—like John McCain—been boiled slowly. We have been tossed quickly into boiling water. And don’t forget what happens when you throw them in. When you throw them in, frogs into boiling water—”

  Beck at this point tossed his frog into the pot, and there was a long pause. No frog jumped from the pot. “Okay, forget the frog,” he resumed. “I swear I thought they jumped right out but they don’t.”

  Only then did Beck say the frog “was fake.” He then asked his guest, former Bush administration official John Bolton, to verify the animal’s inauthenticity. “I know PETA is going to be all over me,” he said. “By the way, the whole thing with the whole boiling water and a frog—that’s fable. It’s not true. We knew before we did that. Ambassador, will you verify that it’s a rubber frog, that’s not a real frog?”

  The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations obliged. “Very rubber,” he said.

  “You didn’t expect to be asked that question, did you?” Beck asked.

  It was the closest Beck had come to the truth all night.

  * * *

  Beck’s show devolves into Animal Planet more often than you might think. Months after the frog sacrifice, Beck got rabid over Joe Biden’s use of an old Sherlock Holmes line to say the administration hadn’t wasted stimulus funds. “As Joe puts it, the dog so far at least hasn’t barked,” Obama said.

  Beck played this on a big screen—and began to bark. It came out as a terrier’s yap but quickly progressed to slobbering Doberman. “Dog hasn’t barked?” he repeated. “It’s like a pack of wild Cujos, ripping up the flesh of the American people. We’ve given you a dozen examples over the past year, stimulus debacles … Oh wait, here’s my favorite: lawn mowers that magically created fifty jobs.”

  Beck let out a maniacal laugh, then turned to the screen and barked some more.

  But if the dog and the frog were not real, the fish almost certainly was. It began with Beck pulling on some latex gloves. “I’ve got the blue gloves, because I thought they went nicely with my eyes,” he said in an effeminate voice. He struggled with the prop. “These are the worst gloves ever! We couldn’t get the stuff with, like, the baby powder in them? These are government gloves! They don’t fit, look.”

  He finally got the gloves on. “Okay, here’s what I want to show you,” he began. “This is the dumbest damn show on air.” No argument was offered to contradict this, but it wasn’t the point Beck was going to make. He was going to talk about “Larry, the dead fish.”

  Beck placed a copy of the New York Times in front of him. He took a foot-long fish out of a bucket. “Meet my friend Larry, the dead fish,” the host said. “Here he is. Hello, Larry.”

  “Hello, America,” Larry the dead fish replied, borrowing a deep voice from Beck.

  “Larry is here for the one reason that—Larry! Whew, Larry. Wow, Larry stinks. Larry is the dead fish that nobody wanted you to see,” Beck continued. “Larry was printing up money last week. That’s what he was doing.”

  Beck began to fold the newspaper around Larry, calling out the various distractions that prevented Americans from noticing that Larry the dead fish had been printing money last week. Obama’s NCAA brackets: “Did you hear about his brackets? I loved his brackets.” The AIG hearing: “Boy, that was really making me angry.” Obama on Jay Leno: “It was just crazy.”

  Larry was now wrapped in newspaper. “All of that was to cover up the dead, stinky fish, the dead, stinky fish that nobody wanted you to pay any attention to: the fact that we were printing our own money and monetizing our debt.”

  * * *

  There is a prop for every occasion, every enemy. A pipe to smoke while imitating liberal eggheads, a 1950s television to show an old clip from The Music Man, a desk to put his feet on while watching some video, and a swastika or hammer-and-sickle emblem to hold up as needed. To illustrate the proliferation of “radicals” in the Obama administration, he played a game of Connect Four against himself on the set. “We have Buffy and Yosi and we have Valerie, right? And then we have Barack Obama,” Beck explained, putting four red checkers together—apparently not realizing that four yellow pieces had already been connected. He had better luck illustrating the corporate takeover of the United States by replacing the stars on the flag with the emblems of General Electric, General Motors, Walmart, Citibank, and others.

  But Beck’s populist assault on the Fortune 500 went only so far. When the topic turned to Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union, the prop was a baseball bat. Beck talks like a good ol’ boy as he describes how the union bosses will beat up on corporations. “Hey, maybe we can just give him the name and address of every executive in American business and provide Andy and his goons with, you know, free baseball bats,” he once said, brandishing the wood and even taking a practice swing. “You know that way they can just beat those company heads into submission. Metaphorically speaking. Of course no union thug would ever use something like that.”

  During an SEIU segment on another show, Beck portrayed Stern as a Mafia boss by playing a clip from The Godfather: “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” (Not to be confused with Larry, the dead fish.) He then held up a shirt that said “Marxist” for White House adviser Van Jones, one that said “I [heart] Mao” for Anita Dunn, and for Stern, a T-shirt that said, “I Wanted to Overthrow the Government in the 1960’s and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt.”

  During another show, Beck had workers in the Fox control room wear purple SEIU shirts, posing as goons. His staff got another dress-up day when Beck had them wear white lab coats and stand with him as he pointed to his chalkboard, where there was an illustration about how the whole world was becoming more socialist, “going for an even more oppressive and bloated government.” Beck beckoned to his white coats. “The doctors know. I mean, they actually don’t but having them stand here makes it seem like I’m right, doesn’t it? Worked for Barack Obama. Why isn’t it working for me?” The “doctors” stood silently, arms folded on chests.

  When it appeared that the White House wasn’t getting the message that the stimulus plan wasn’t working, Beck tried to amplify his message—by using a bullhorn on the set. To dramatize White House adviser Dunn’s speech to high school students praising Mao, Beck invited a parent of one of the private-school children who heard the speech on the show to criticize Dunn. He had the father shot in silhouette, as if he were in the witness protection program, and distorted his voice so he sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. “Concerned Parent,” the father was labeled on-screen.

  “Mao would have preferred to silence the opposition by putting a bullet to the back of the head,” the concerned parent/chipmunk said. “There are subtle ways to do it, and I think we’re seeing it right now.”

  Such as dousing people with gasoline on TV?

  Still, no chipmunks, fish, frogs, or dogs compare to the strange animals viewers saw on their screens one evening in July 2009. It began as one of Beck’s fairly common rants against AmeriCorps, the community service program created by Bill Clinton and embraced by Obama.

  “Do you remember when Barack Obama was on the campaign trail and he said, ‘Oh I’m going to have an army of people in America and they’ll be better financed than the military’?”

  No, we don’t remember that, but go on.

  “I think AmeriCorps is part of that army,” Beck explained. “And they—you know, I got the pledge and I was going to read it to you, but I thought, you know, I can’t really read it to you, you know, sitting here like this.”

  With that, Beck jumped up from his desk and ripped off his jacket to reveal a full lederhosen ensemble: the knickers, the long socks, and the vest.

  “I mean, to really go for it, I mean, to really do the AmeriCorps pledge, I th
ink you have to be dressed like this. I think—I think you have to stand up and take your pledge.”

  He raised his hand and made a three-finger salute. He pledged: “I will get things done for America, to make our people safer, and smarter, and healthier. I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities. Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground. Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond. I am an AmeriCorps member, and I will get things done.”

  Beck then broke into the song “Edelweiss” from The Sound of Music.

  This performance earned the host a curtain call on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

  “Why the German outfit?” O’Reilly asked. “Why the Edelweiss? Why? This is AmeriCorps; this is America.”

  “Yes, I don’t know,” Beck answered. “I think it’s about time that we used ridicule in this country.”

  “Who are you ridiculing? The Germans? The AmeriCorps people?”

  Beck explained that “if Rahm Emanuel gets his way,” AmeriCorps “will be required service” for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. There are no such plans for the program to be anything other than voluntary.

  O’Reilly, usually in sync with Beck on philosophy, told him that “I’m not with you on the AmeriCorps.”

  O’Reilly later in the interview posed a reasonable question. “You do a lot of this kind of whacked-out stuff, the dancing with the lederhosen and interviewing yourself. Do you run a risk that some people are just going to dismiss the serious stuff that you’re doing, the important points you’re trying to make, because of the burlesque?”

  “Yes, I do run that risk,” Beck retorted. “But have you seen the ratings at 5 P.M.? Okay? [You] don’t get those ratings at 5 P.M. by being Charlie Rose.”

  “I have to say that when I saw this in my office,” O’Reilly said of the lederhosen episode, “I thought you were back on the sauce.”

  “It could happen at any time,” Beck replied.

  “Number two, I said to myself, is this the Hitler Youth thing he’s doing? You know, because the Hitler Youth had the little short pants.”

  “Yes, but that’s lederhosen there. That’s completely different.”

  “Beck, I think it was the Hitler Youth thing,” O’Reilly charged.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bill O’Reilly.”

  Good thing Beck didn’t have a gas can with him.

  CHAPTER 12

  PAGING AGENT MULDER

  Glenn Beck woke up on the morning of March 3, 2009, and took a walk out onto a grassy knoll. He went on Fox & Friends, the Fox News morning show, and spoke words that, until that moment, had been confined to shows such as The X-Files, not cable news. He said it just might be true that the Obama administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency was staffing and maintaining concentration camps to imprison political dissenters as part of a plan to suspend the Constitution.

  “We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination,” he proffered. “I wanted to debunk these FEMA camps. I’m tired of hearing about them. You know about them. I’m tired of hearing about them. I wanted to debunk them. We’ve now for several days done research on them. I can’t debunk them.”

  In fact, he suggested, he seemed to believe in the camps himself. “If you trust our government, it’s fine,” he continued. “If you have any kind of fear that we might be heading towards a totalitarian state: Look out. Buckle up. There’s something going on in our country that is—ain’t good.”

  By the time Beck walked onto the set that evening for his 5 P.M. show, something weird had happened. He decided to clam up. Probably something involving Lee Harvey Oswald and the Trilateral Commission.

  “I was going to talk about it today, but as I came in this morning and then I went into my office and I was looking at all the research that are being compiled, and it wasn’t complete,” he explained. “And I am not willing to bring something to you that is half-baked. If these things exist, that’s bad, and we will cover it. If they don’t exist, it’s irresponsible to not debunk this story.”

  But given that Beck had already said he couldn’t debunk the story about the U.S. Department of Concentration Camps, this comment only added to the intrigue, and implied more validity to the rumor. “We have an independent group on this program looking into it, turning over every stone,” the host said. “I am going to bring you this story. This program is not beholden—This is going to drive the conspiracy theorists crazy. They’re making me say this. Help!—this program is not beholden to anybody. We answer to ourselves. I answer to me. I lost sleep last night worrying about this story, thinking about this story, and wanted to make sure I got it right.”

  As a teaser, though, Beck said there was news that “fits together like a puzzle” and “it all adds up to government control.” He then introduced his guest, libertarian former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who added to the suspicion:

  “FEMA is already very, very powerful and they overrule [local authorities] when they go in on emergencies. So in some ways, they can accomplish what you might be thinking about setting up camps. And they don’t necessarily have to have legislation, you know, to do the things that we dread, but it’s something that deserves attention.”

  “Right,” Beck said. “And I want to make it very clear: I’m not fearing these things are happening.”

  No, he was just saying he “can’t debunk” the allegation that they were, in fact, happening—and that was all many on the far right needed to confirm their belief that Obama was seeking to suspend the Constitution and imprison them for disagreeing with him.

  Beck might as well have issued a call to arms to the dormant militia movement: The Obama administration is coming to get you. It was a case study in how he has brought the far-out fringes of the Internet into the mainstream in a way no other person in the news business has done.

  Still, there was a delicious irony in Beck’s elevation of the concentration camp conspiracy theory to legitimate news story. To the extent anybody in the U.S. government did contemplate such a scheme, it was none other than Beck’s colleague at Fox News, Ollie North.

  The FEMA concentration camp story has floated around for a quarter century or more. The closest it ever came to reality was in 1987, when the Iran-Contra investigation was under way and the Miami Herald published a breathless story:

  REAGAN ADVISERS RAN “SECRET” GOVERNMENT

  President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.

  Investigators believe that the advisers’ activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the contras now under investigation.

  Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.

  Aha! It was Colonel North, in the eighties, with the secret FEMA plan. And now he’s hosting Fox’s War Stories.

  The Herald reported that North’s idea involved a “secret contingency plan that called for … turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”

  This, in turn, was similar to a plan drafted by the Nixon administration, in 1970, which proposed a declaration of martial law if there were an uprising by black militants; at least 21 million African Americans would be placed in “assembly centers or relocation camps.”

  North’s brainstorm was shot down by cooler heads in the Reagan administration. The colonel himself, in congressional testimony, denied advocating such a plan and said the government had adopted no such plan.

  But
the story still proved embarrassing, winding up as Soviet propaganda; the Russian news agency Tass reported on plans to suspend the Constitution “in the interests of protecting the rears of the aggressive policy of the military-industrial complex.”

  It was eventually forgotten, except among the conspiracy theorists. In the 1998 X-Files movie, Agent Fox Mulder was told that “FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. It allows creation of a non-elected government. Think about that, Agent Mulder.”

  During the Bush years, when Michael “Brownie” Brown’s FEMA couldn’t handle a hurricane, much less the secret imprisonment of millions of political dissenters, the conspiracy theory didn’t gain much traction. But then came Obama’s inauguration, and Beck’s arrival at Fox News. It was time for The X-Files to meet mainstream journalism.

  Even a number of conservatives were appalled. “What the hell is going on at Fox News?” former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in a blog post after Beck’s “can’t debunk” moment. Frum also wasn’t pleased to see that Beck, during an hour-long “televangelical special” on Fox the week before, had given each audience member what Frum said was a book written by a John Bircher and a “grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller.”

  Apparently Beck couldn’t debunk this one-world-government conspiracy, either.

  “Are we headed for one world government?” he asked at the top of a later show, in October 2009. “America, if you believe this country is great but you—you’re not really into that whole one world government thing, watch out—because the masks are coming off.”

  Beck alleged that White House officials were trying to “fundamentally transform this country into something revolutionary, almost Venezuelan in nature.” He predicted that the government would fail, and “mark my words, it’s the IMF or the U.N. Government and even bigger government will come to the rescue.”