Beck likes to lavish praise on his mentor, the late W. Cleon Skousen. But as is usually the case with Beck, he leaves out pertinent information that may provide a fuller - more accurate - picture of the man whose ideology provides the foundation for Beck's 9-12 movement and much of Beck's day-to-day rhetoric.
Back in the day, Skousen got crosswise with Mormon officials at Brigham Young University, where he was teaching. Skousen undertook to teach certain subject matter that was so controversial that it caused a great deal of agitation and dissension among the otherwise congenial religious students. Skousen was called out by colleagues, and they all went toe-to-toe (intellectually) in writing in BYU's publication Diaglogue.
It is an entirely fascinating exchange, and the points made are remarkably relevant in today's political debate - even though this knock-down-drag-out smack down occurred in 1971.
I've never heard Beck refer to it, although it was revealed by Salon's Alexander Zaitchik in September 2009.
First some background on Skousen, and then highlights of the Diaglogue exchange.
HE BLINDED ME WITH SKOUSEN
“It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” - Abraham Maslow
Or in Beck's case, it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a Skousen, to treat everything as if it were a progressive new world order conspiracy. What is a Skousen? A Skousen is W. Cleon Skousen, an anti-Communist fanatic of the 1950s, end-times prophecy enthusiast, Mormon and Beck's role model. Skousen died in 1996, but Beck has been busy resurrecting him from the ash heap of history. He was apparently introduced to Skousen's work in 2007 when, as reported by Zaitchik, a friend sent him a copy of one of Skousen's books, The 5,000 Year Leap. This resulted in an epiphany for Beck, reportedly giving him "clarity" for various notions of "freedom" he had (for some reason) been trying to organize. Clarity? More like myopia. Ever since Beck started reading the collected works of Skousen, he has focused on paranoid Red-scare/new world order mumbo jumbo like a laser beam. And given that 2007 was before the Obama presidential campaign, it tends to look like Beck was putting the conspiracy cart before the horse.
Beck has made Leap the cornerstone of his 9-12 movement. He has touted the book many times to his followers as an important reference for them to read as part of their "Progressives Suck" correspondence courses. He wrote an introduction for the latest edition, in which he gushed:
"Do you remember our resolve on September 12, our promise to each other to link arms and face the coming storms together? Those storms are now boiling overhead - our Republic is at stake. You don’t have to be like Washington's troops and track bloody footprints through the snow at Valley Forge, let's pray to God we never have to go there again. To fight this battle, you need to read, to understand."
For the love of God, the Republic is at stake, man! One can almost see the red, white and blue tears rolling down Beck's ample cheeks. And on a side note - isn't it oddly reminiscent of the "Valley Forge" language used by Father Charles Coughlindeclaring himself and his followers revolutionaries in the vein of the Founders fighting an oppressive dictator in the form of the United States government:
"I am characterized as a revolutionary for raising my voice against these palpable injustices while the blind Bourbons cannot see the writing on the wall nor read the pages of history written in crimson by pens which were dipped into bleeding hearts at Concord, Lexington and Valley Forge! In 1776 Washington and Jefferson and their compatriots had hurled at them the vile epithet of "revolutionary." Their lands had been over-taxed. Their laborers and farmers had been exploited. Their liberties had been denied. Their right to free speech and to petition had been scoffed at! They, too, were called "revolutionary." Today, when the rights to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of happiness have been obstructed by an economic system of high finance far more vicious in its implications and results than were the unjust political aggressions of a George III, they who protest against them are classified and indexed with the patriots of 1776."
Back to Leap. Leap in and of itself is not exactly a literary masterpiece. In fact, a review reveals that it has all the sophistication and nuance of a coloring book. Founders - yay! God - yay! This critique seems to capture it:
"Leap" is a work of interpretive history, one that treats the American founding as a "miracle," and renders the Founders as having an air of semi-divinity about them. In its worshipful tone and substance, it blurs the line between religion and nationalism -- not in a frightening way, but rather in a hokey, 1950s civic-religion way. This is the kind of book you'd expect Opie's civics teacher in Mayberry to assign to him. It's an eccentric book to be sure, and a poorly written, poorly argued and sentimental one. It is, I mean to say, a bad book, but it's not an evil book or a crazy book.
While the style and substance may be unsophisticated and seemingly harmless, the purpose seems to be much more pernicious. In essence, Skousen's goal appears to be nothing short of rewriting history, converting the Founders from the Age of Enlightenment scholars they were into religious zealots on a crusade to create a Christian theocracy in the new world. Certainly this seems to be the take-away message for Beck - that he might actually be able to get away with a de facto Constitutional amendment eliminating the separation of church and state. During his November 25, 2009 show, Beck stated bluntly, "Progressives have built up this wall of separation between church and state, and it's nonsense." Nonsense? Beck may need to do a bit more research on the Founders, as it was Thomas Jefferson who stated: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” In fact, the phrase "separation of church and state" is generally attributed to Jefferson. He included it in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, in which he referred to the First Amendment, that "act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'" as building a "wall of separation between Church and State." James Madison, principal author of the Bill of Rights, similarly stated, "We are teaching the world the great truth that Govts. do better without Kings & Nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson that Religion flourishes in greater purity, without than with the aid of Govt." If a Founder shouts in the woods but Beck ignores him, does he make a sound?
It is interesting that Beck chose to introduce his followers to Skousen with Leap instead of, say, The Making of America. The Skousen of Leap is like the kindly Dr. Seuss of patriotism. The Skousen of The Making of America is far less charming. It was in this book that Skousen referred to African American children as "pickaninnies" and endorsed the concept that slave owners were the "worst victims of slavery".
Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, "The Making of America" explained that "[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains."
Much more here - must read.
Beck accuses progressives of attempting to subversively accomplish radical change through the slow, sneaky process of evolution instead of the speedy violent revolution of say, a Marxist, but isn't that what Beck is doing with Skousen? Introducing the world gently to Skousen with the banal Leap, and then gradually shifting that Overton window to the right to frame Skousen's more controversial and offensive theories as mainstream and acceptable?
In The Naked Communist, published in 1958 at the height of the Red scare, Skousen argued that the Soviet Union was attempting to take control of other governments. The book includes a 45-item list of communist goals. These include, for example:
Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
Beck has adopted Skousen's points practically ver batim and made them his own.
It’s like he’s using a 50 year old playbook. These points comprise the substance of many of Beck’s shows. It is the hammer which makes everything look to him like a nail, and it provides the structure into which Beck pastes his random bits of purportedly incriminating information. It is the very reason the phrase "a little learning is a dangerous thing" was invented. Beck picked up The Naked Communist, he read it and he blindly follows it literally and seemingly without question. Beck cannot, or will not, process this information in historical context or with intellectual honesty. Beck ignores the fact that the more extreme Skousen became, the more he and his ideas were rejected Skousen at one time participated in a lucrative speaking circuit as a part of the John Birch Society's American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The ASC eventually booted him out, with one member, William C. Mott (the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy) reportedly finding Skousen to be "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends." Skousen accused President Roosevelt's advisor Harry Hopkins of treason. And when Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's (the co-founder of the John Birch Society's) charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's corporate clients dumped him.
Beck's current progressive witch-hunt is really is just the latest installment of a national affliction which goes into remission from time to time but keeps returning with a new, more noxious mutation. And in some ways it really starts to look like paint-by-the-numbers swiftboating.
THE NAKED SKOUSEN
But Skousen received his most emphatic smackdown, perhaps one of the most eloquent, most epic smackdowns of all time, as a result of his book The Naked Capitalist published in 1970. This was Skousen's review of a book written by Professor Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. Quigley was a noted Harvard-educated historian, Ivy League professor and an authority on the development of civilizations. Tragedy and Hope is Quigley's lengthy, textbook-like account of the influence of certain wealthy and powerful individuals on world financial and political systems in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Skousen came across a copy of the obscure, academic Tragedy and Hope published several years previously and seized upon it as evidence of a malevolent new world order conspiracy, engineered by a wealthy elite. The Naked Capitalist is Skousen's interpretation of Tragedy and Hope, in which he makes the bizarre claim that Quigley, by virtue of his access to the source material he analyzed in order to write the book, was an insider in this evil circle of global subversives and that he wrote Tragedy and Hope as an announcement that this group of elites was taking over and a one world government structure was imminent. The people of the world had no hope now of avoiding it and if they tried to fight it they would surely suffer tragedy at the hands of these oppressive, all-powerful dictators. Skousen took it upon himself, in the form of The Naked Captialist, to trumpet his incredible find and alert the world. (Who does this remind us of?)
Skousen was on the faculty of Brigham Young University and The Naked Capitalist was a part of the curriculum for some professors. The book, and Skousen's associated political agitating in connection therewith, caused so much dissention at the school among both faculty and students that the controversy was addressed in the school's periodical, Dialogue. The Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of the journal presented a "Round Table Review" of The Naked Capitalist by several individuals, including Professor Louis C. Midgley of Brigham Young University. The editors also received a review from Professor William E. Fort, Jr., also on the faculty of Brigham Young University. The editors subsequently invited Professor Quigley to respond to both The Naked Capitalist and Midgley's review, provided Skousen with an opportunity for a rebuttal to Midgley and Quigley, and then included a final response by Midgley to Skousen's rebuttal.
Fort's review is cursory and not much more than a brief, uncritical endorsement of Skousen's work. Midgley's review, however, must truly be one of the most epic, powerful and well-written smack downs ever put to paper. It is an eloquent, wise and comprehensive debunking of The Naked Capitalist as well a scathing rebuke of Skousen's analytical skills. Under the subheading "The Cult of Conspiracy" Midgley writes (all emphasis added):
The Naked Capitalist is intended to expose a massive, top-secret, Capitalist super-conspiracy. Communism and socialism, we are told, are merely some of the fruit of this Gigantic International Monolithic Network of Total Global Power. Skousen now believes that it is the Capitalists who have been secretly "running the world" for many years, forming "a conspiratorial control center higher and stronger than either Moscow or Peiping." The Naked Capitalist is intended to strip bare this "Global Establishment" which secretly plans, plots, and conspires to rule the world. Now you have perhaps always thought that the hard-working, money-making Capitalists were the Good Guys in Skousen's demonology. Nothing could be further from the truth. He believes that "globalism," "internationalism," "one-worldism," and ruthless centralized dictatorship are what the Capitalist demons have in mind. They only use communism to achieve these goals.
…
Much of what Skousen claims to have found in Quigley's book is simply not there. There are numerous places in The Naked Capitalist in which Skousen (1) asserts something about Quigley but then inadvertently reveals that he completely misunderstands Quigley's remarks; (2) simply invents fantastic ideas and attributes them to Quigley; or (3) makes inferences from Quigley's book that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary."
[Who does (1) (2) and (3) remind us of? Kind of seems to be Beck's M.O. exactly.]
Midgley then proceeds to provide and analyze specific examples of each. He then continues:
"The story Quigley tells is good enough. Why then expand it into a lurid tale of global conspiracy and subversion when it is not even a story of a secret conspiracy at all, but merely a reasonable account of the role of one group within the complex of American and world politics? It is by a strange magic that Quigley's account of the role of certain international bankers and their friends in England and the United States becomes transformed in Skousen's mind into a top-secret, Super-capitalist, Super-conspiracy of a global nature. Quigley makes it clear that banking interests and the groups they support are (1) not secret (only semi-secret like most financial, governmental and university affairs generally), (2) not a subversive or crim- inal conspiracy, (3) not global, only international in the sense that some ties were maintained between bankers and intellectuals in England and the United States), and (4) not really monstrous, sinister, or demonic (but more nearly meddling, naive, idealistic and vain — all rather typical faults of both intellectuals and the wealthy).
…
But the Quigley that Skousen has invented (or rather appropriated from the John Birch Society) is not the real Quigley at all. Skousen's picture of Quigley as an elite member of a criminal conspiracy who is now willing to tell the inside story is unprincipled fabrication and a clear piece of deceit. Unless Skousen had planted in the reader's mind his fantasy about Quigley writing a book "to expose world-wide conspiracy and disclose many of its most secret operations" (p. 4), it would never occur to a reader of Tragedy and Hope that Quigley was anything but the author of a textbook on recent world history in which some account is offered of the political activities of financial capitalism."
["Unless Skousen had planted in the reader's mind his fantasy"...Something Beck is very skilled at doing as well.]
And then from Midgley an admonition:
Has Cleon Skousen simply invented the utterly false, paranoid view of politics and history advanced in The Naked Capitalist? Carroll Quigley informs me that for over two years the John Birch Society and other radicals have been busy distorting the contents of his Tragedy and Hope in order to support their own paranoid fantasy about a super-conspiracy behind the multitude of evils in the world today. Skousen has bought without question the dogma of the Birchers and other radicals. He is now busy using his rhetorical powers to charm and flatter Church members into accepting the dogmas of his conspiracy cult. He has made an accommodation between the gospel of Jesus Christ and, of all things, a vain and wholly absurd worldly ideology. The immediate result of Skousen's activity is a kind of radical cult within the Church. He and his friends make every effort to teach their radical political dogmas as if they were truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
...
The Lord has warned the Saints to avoid secret combinations (see Ether 8:19, 22-6); we are not told to start our own secret combination to counter the evils we see or think we see in the world. We are not to follow the pattern set by this world; our politics should be of an entirely different kind; our Kingdom is not of this world. We are not commissioned to win this world for the Lord by joining some seedy and unseemly political mass movement like that offered by the New Left or the Radical Right. No conspiracy, not even a Skousen-type Super-Conspiracy, can possibly frustrate the Kingdom of God; the Saints need not fear the corruption of this world if they keep their eyes and hearts on the Master. Brigham Young gave us some good advice as to how we as partakers in the Lord's priesthood should deal with political questions: "Let no Religious test be required or the Holy influence and Power of the Priesthood be brought to bear in any Political question. If the inherent merits of all such matters will not furnish argument sufficient for all necessary purposes, then let them go; for it is better that the whole Political fabric, corrupt as we know it to be, should totter and go to destruction, than for our Saints to be offended." Brigham Young warned us not to permit the trivial matter of this world's politics to influence us in the least and added: "and never, no never! no never!! again drag Priesthood into Political gentile warfare." (Letter, July 20, 1849.) In spite of such prophetic warning the conspiracy cult thrives."
Midgley definitely has Skousen's number, and Beck's too, for that matter. Sowing dissention, conflating politics with God's will, turning citizen against citizen. Cleary Beck does not feel the need to follow the advice of Brigham Young regarding dragging purported religious authority into political battles.
Quigley's review of The Naked Capitalist is next, in which he fully endorses Midgley's analysis. He also accuses Skousen of mischaracterizing him. Read it here.
One can only imagine Skousen's mortification as he read Midgley's review and Quigley's associated comments. He attempted a response, which is peevish and thoroughly unpersuasive. He seems determined to put words in Quigley's mouth and twist and distort Tragedy and Hope into something it simply is not. Connecting the dots where none exist - just like Beck.
The final word goes to Midgley:
...
Quigley tells us that the title of his book points to the tragedy of war and the hope that mankind will turn from hatred to Christian love and thereby learn to live with others with whom we differ (see pp. 131Off.). Unless we begin to manifest love, he maintains, we will destroy ourselves in senseless war. This is what he means by the phrase "inclusive diversity." Therefore he can say "that diverse peoples with diverse beliefs must live together in a single community." Skousen has pounced on the harmless word "must," inferring from it that Quigley wants "compulsion, the loss of Constitutional freedoms and deceptive police state tactics," collectivism, globalism, and "one-world amalgamation of the United States and the Soviet Union." All these terrible things are inferred from the harmless little word Quigley used to express his belief in the necessity of loving our neighbors.
…
I know the truth of the prophetic warnings against various kinds of radical political activities, including communism and birchism. But there has never been one word from our prophets warning us of Skousen's myth of a bankers' conspiracy. Instead, the prophets tell us that we have nothing to fear from the wicked in this world if we hold fast to the iron rod of the gospel. But that involves not following Skousen-type programs, which fight the worldly wicked with their own tool — hate — rather than return love for the evil that abounds in this world. Obviously, I have placed myself in opposition to such "living prophets" as Robert Welch and many other such pariahs, but that is another matter. Perhaps Skousen accepts such men as "living prophets"; in any case he has certainly attempted to affect an accommodation between their strange message and the gospel of Jesus Christ.
.... This is a mean game. Wherever Skousen and his disciples are able to spread their cult we see hostile camps, disunity in the Church and loss of conviction in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Skousen has pounced on the harmless word "must," inferring from it that Quigley wants "compulsion, the loss of Constitutional freedoms and deceptive police state tactics," collectivism, globalism, and "one-world amalgamation of the United States and the Soviet Union." All these terrible things are inferred from the harmless little word ... Once again, this is Beck's M.O. to a tea.
I encourage you to read the entire document here.
It is very difficult to reconcile Beck's vicious onslaught of anger, hatred, ugly accusations and race-baiting with the Mormon teachings, according to Midgely, of returning love for evil and eschewing political wrangling for trust in, and reliance upon, holy scriptures.
As with Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy, Skousen was ultimately discredited. In 1979 the LDS church issued an order stating "no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute [Skousen's organization dedicated to conspiracy studies] lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures."
It's unclear why Beck seized on Skousen's work and gripped it to him tightly like a security blanket. Perhaps when Beck found "clarity" for his own visions of "freedom" in Skousen's work, what he really found was a means to give his personal animus for liberals and his other extremist views the facade of normalcy and respectability. Or maybe it gave him insight into how to manipulate certain people the way they had been manipulated in the past. The danger of Skousen's theories is that they enable conservatives who seek to eliminate things like civil rights, public schools and the Constitutional protection of equality to dissemble their true motives by purporting to be acting out of patriotic concern regarding Communist (or progressive) subversion. Their ideas can't win on the merits, so they bring out unethical tactics like witch hunting, demagoguery and character assassination, all wrapped the anti-Communist-American-flag.
There is a legitimate, fair, ethical way to express concerns about political policies with which you disagree, and then there is the fear-mongering, propagandizing, unfair, cheap shot way to do it. Beck has chosen the latter.