With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: "I could give a flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. "We're an entertainment company," Beck says.
-Glenn Beck, Forbes interview, April 8, 2010
The hate-seeking drones will brave the DC Metro this Saturday to cheer Beck on in his White Man's Lib Woodstock, blissfully (or willfully) ignorant of how easily Beck cynically manipulates them like puppets on strings.
The quote from Forbes above - they just ignore or rationalize away. If they didn't, their heads may explode. "We're an entertainment company." Talk about a slap in the face to Beck's followers.
They've already had to rationalize away his entire history as a loud-mouthed, mean-spirited Morning Zoo DJ. His failure to finish college. His admitted lengthy history of alcohol and drug abuse. His first failed marriage. His long history of sexist and racist comments. He once called Jesse Jackson "the stinking king of the race lords." His hero Skousen's racist writings and association with the Birchers. His extended alienation of major advertisers.
And don't even ask about the sketch with the "New KKK" and the "close-to-painful murdering of the dark people."
Beck's followers must have the self-esteem of a gnat at this point. They are in the precarious position of having to accept everything Beck does or has ever done, no matter how outrageous or patently wrong, or admit their own foolishness from the start. The Beckeror has no clothes! Don't say it out loud!
And the more abuse they take, the more it emboldens Beck to think that he can get away with pretty much anything.
I mean, in 2006 he interviewed and supported Imam Rauf as a "good Muslim". And now Beck turns around and vilifies Rauf's Cordoba House. Convenient demagoguery rules. Beck's followers just accept this, no questions asked. They have to even if it makes no sense. They are forced to exist in a world where reason, logic and common decency have no meaning. That, or the house of cards comes crashing down.
And that's not the only example.
I think the most frightening is from 2007.
Beck may have tipped his hand in April 2007 with his comments about The Years of Extermination, a book by Saul Friedländer chronicling the details of Nazi tactics used during the Holocaust. Beck’s comments, which he shared on his radio show, provide a frightening insight into Beck’s interest in, and study of, mass manipulation techniques:
"I go on vacation for three days, and I decide to take my family away. And I'm there at the beach, and we're reading. And I take -- my wife takes some magazines and stuff, and we take the books for the kids, and I take The Years of Extermination. It's a new book. And I just -- 'cause it's, like, 800 billion pages thick. I'm just not going to have the time to read it. And I'm doing some research right now for some other thoughts that I have that are probably six months away from percolating.
And I'm reading this book trying to do some research. And what this book is, is how do you get people to kill people? How do you get -- not just Germany -- all of Europe to kill the Jews. To round them up and kill them. How do you do that? That's what this book is about. And it is a phenomenal..."
These remarks are disturbing. In April of 2007, Glenn Beck is, by his own report, on vacation with his family, trying to do some "research” about tactics the Nazis used to manipulate people. Why? What "research" is he doing? How does this relate to his job as a talk show host? And Beck describes the book as "phenomenal."
Then there are his candid 2005 remarks about the 9/11 families:
And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh shut up!" I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them.
THIS FROM THE FOUNDER OF THE 9/12 MOVEMENT! What will it take for Beck's followers to see they are being played.
In November 2008, Beck says that he'd always maintained that Jesus and Hitler had a lot in common. One was good, the other evil. But they could both go to people who were afraid, hopeless, hungry, and living in fear, and say "Don't worry, I've got a plan. Come follow me". (paraphrasing).
How revealing. Isn't that what Beck has been saying, and will say again this weekend? I have a plan, come follow me? In fact, he used to open his show by saying point blank "Follow me." Oh yeah, he knows exactly what he's doing. Inject fear and you can lead the frightened and weak-minded anywhere. (I won't mention how Beck crucified Anita Dunn for a similar remark - that saying Mao and Mother Theresa had one thing in common - and that made Dunn a life-long mass-murder-condoing Mao-lover-worshiper. I won't point out that by the same logic these comments make Beck a Hitler worshiper.)
A similar thing happened when Ben Stein was a guest in July of 2008. Beck and Stein discussed Obama's upcoming speech to accept the Democratic nomination:
STEIN: I want -- I'm glad you brought up this Denver thing. I don't like the idea of Senator Obama giving his acceptance speech in front of 75,000 wildly cheering people. That is not the way we do things in political parties in the United States of America. We have a contained number of people in an arena. Seventy-five-thousand people at an outdoor sports palace, well, that's something the Fuehrer would have done. And I think whoever is advising Senator Obama to do this is bringing up all kinds of very unfortunate images from the past.
BECK: Well, yeah, you know what? I've been -- I've been saying that we're headed towards a Mussolini-style presidency forever.
STEIN: Well, I think --
BECK: I mean it's crazy.
STEIN: It's a scary situation. I mean, I think he has to recognize some bounds on his own ego. I understand politicians are politicians because they have ego deficit problems and they try to cure them by having lots of worship and adulation and adoration. But 75,000 people screaming at an outdoor arena, that's just too much. It's just -- it's scarily authoritarian.
BECK: Ben --
STEIN: It's like Juan Peron --
BECK: It's not --
STEIN: -- and Evita.
BECK: It's not gonna make a difference.
Scarily authoritarian.
Looks like the Fuehrer is on the other foot now, Glenn.
From this it seems to me that Beck has had a plan - on a massive scale - from the start of his political evangelical phase. After all, Beck's personal hero is Orson Welles. His company is called Mercury Radio Arts (after Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre on the Air). And then there's this:
When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."
"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."
Wow. It would not surprise me one bit if Beck at that point set his mean little mind on doing Welles bigger and better (badder) than anyone! Stupid rip-off?? How dare they!! I'll show them! As God is my witness, I'll never be unfamous or unwealthy again!
Beck knows what buttons to push and he pushes them without shame or conscience. His tactics are so crude and obvious as to be laughable - if they weren't so dangerous and divisive, doing serious damage to the social fabric of our nation.
HOW MANY MORE SIGNS DO THESE PEOPLE NEED OF WHAT LONESOME RHODES BECK IS DOING TO THEM?
You almost feel sorry for the gullible schmucks, being soaked by Beck at every turn for books, web memberships, magazine subscriptions, tickets, t-shirts and the like. Almost. But not really.
UPDATE: I'm taking out the Horowitz quote. It's from my hand-written transcript of the show and I don't have a link for it.
UPDATE 2:
Putting it back in. I have a youtube video of the statement I was looking for:
David Horowitz was a guest on the Beck show in November of 2009. He also made some unintentionally revealing remarks. He was purportedly talking about what “the Left” is doing, but inadvertently revealed Beck's own strategy. Starting at 7:30 in the video below:
"That is the way you will mobilize them. If they see a threat to everything they that have, which is what they're seeing now, then they will be mobilized, this is what happened during the cold war, conservatives came together, the coalition was forged around anti-communism, because the communist movement was a threat to everything they believed in……"
I call that the "oops moment". Forging a movement around an anti-communism threat?
VIDEO: