A miracle occurred this week when Bill Kristol found the guts to call out Glenn Beck:
When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
This of course prompted a days-long, ongoing hissyfit against Kristol from crybaby Beck (although how much of this was motivated by hurt feelings as opposed to a desperate attempt to revive his flagging ratings is unclear):
BECK: Bill Kristol has said, me and anybody else that says, "You know, maybe we should hold off on the Muslim Brotherhood thing," is just a John Bircher. Really the Egyptian revolt is 1776, according to William Kristol.
Beck looks to the "spiritual inspiration" of the Muslim Brotherhood for his analysis (such as it is). So let's look to the "spiritual inspiration" for Glenn Beck, his political activism, and the 9-12 Project.
From "Common Nonsense", the excellent Glenn Beck expose by Alexander Zaitchik [HuffPo excerpt]:
Beck's favorite author and biggest influence, meanwhile, is W. Cleon Skousen. The author of four of the ten books on Beck's 9.12 Project required-reading list, Skousen embodied the Birchite view captured in the title of a September 1965 cover story in the John Birch Society Bulletin, "Fully Expose the 'Civil Rights' Fraud, and You Will Break the Back of the Communist Conspiracy!"
The Benson/Skousen axis of the 1960s, to which Beck would have been an energetic party, was a multi-generational affair. In 1965, Salt Lake City was plunged into hysteria when Reed Benson (son of Ezra) and Mark Skousen (nephew of Cleon) spread rumors that the NAACP was sending two thousand Black Muslims to attack the Tabernacle. When general panic ensued, the Utah National Guard was placed on alert and began practicing riot maneuvers in anticipation of the invasion. After calm was restored, the Anti-Defamation League and the NAACP both condemned the Bircher-fomented race-war fearmongering in Utah. (Both groups have also condemned Beck.) The next month, the Bulletin published articles describing blacks as "savages" and civil rights leaders as "animals."
Hmmm. Is history repeating itself? Is someone spreading rumors about (black) Muslims on the attack?
More from Zaitchik [Salon excerpt]...
... A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, .....
...
After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. ...
...
... One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes."
...
When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. ... Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.
That just gives you a taste. Worth reading the entire article here. In fact, go buy the book, and buy a couple copies for your tea party friends.
Mediamatters reports that Skousen's book, "The Making of America", includes the following passages:
Emancipated slaves hated because of Civil War and "carpetbag regime." ...the diminishing returns from slave ownership would have driven slave prices so low that, in self-defense, owners would have made tenants of their laborers, thrown them upon their own resources, and placed dependence upon rentals for profits. It likewise seems reasonable to believe that by this solution the Negro might have escaped the revulsion of feeling against him that resulted from forcible emancipation and the carpetbag regime." [The Making of America, page 737]
Southern slavery better than Northern freedom. "The free Negro had rather more opportunity for economic advancement in the South than in the North. The Southerner was bothered by the race problem but knew how to handle the individual Negro, ... Abraham Lincoln could not have maintained his standing in the Republican party had he not been a staunch supporter of the Illinois exclusion law and a firm opponent of political and social equality. .... Some Negroes, having been freed and sent to any Northern state which would receive them, became so miserable as to solicit a return to slavery." [The Making of America, pages 735-736]
Abraham Lincoln has a firm opponent of political and social equality? Does Glenn Beck know this?
Cruelty rare, slave owners "the worst victims." "Excessive toil occurred only where the masters or overseers were feeble witted as well as brutal. A persistent rumor among abolitionists was that sugar planters followed a policy of working slaves to death in seven years as a matter of economy. The persons spreading such reports were as ignorant of Negro nature as they were of conditions in the sugar mills. Furthermore, they overrated the ability of the masters to know how to kill a slave in the given time instead of leaving him a broken-down burden to the plantation. ....Harriet Martineau, after watching slaves go through the motions of work without tiring themselves, considered the planters as models of patience ..... Numerous observers, ...agreed that ... the slave owners were the worst victims of the system." [The Making of America, pages 733-734
Read more shocking passages here.
If a Democrat based a political movement on a man with a record like Skousen's - Beck would skewer him. Why haven't Cleon Skousen and his relationships ever showed up on one of Beck's chalkboards?
Can we really now say that comparisons between Glenn Beck and the John Birch Society are completely off the mark? The tea party/9-12 Movement is based on the "spiritual inspiration" of Cleon Skousen - a man who supported the John Birch Society and who furthered a grossly ignorant and deeply offensive "story of slavery"?
A lot comes to the surface when you start to do your own homework about Glenn Beck.
And if you want to read an excellent smack down of someone who obviously had Skousen's number - readRound Table Review, a publication of Brigham Young University in the 1970s. This is a written debate between Skousen, Carroll Quigley (author of Tragedy and Hope, a work appropriated and misinterpreted by the John Birch Society for its own purposes) and Louis Midgley. This is truly some of the best writing I have ever seen in Midgley's takedown of Skousen's naked demagoguery. And it applies so well to Skousen's disciple Beck as well.