Republican Party conspiracy theories

Peter King's witch hunt hearings on Islamunofascistoliberalism are a reminder that the Republican Party is now a welcoming home to a number of crackpot conspiracy theories. Sarah Posner provides a primer on the anti-Muslim conspiracy theories current popular with the Republican right - and is there anything but the right remaining in the Republican Party? - in Welcome to the Shari'ah Conspiracy Theory Industry How the American right demonizes Islam for political gain Religion Dispatches 03/08/2011.

Alexander Zaitchik summarizes his research on the conspiracies that flow freely from Glenn Beck's feverish mind to his mouth to his FOX News audience in
Fringe Mormon Group Makes Myths with Glenn Beck’s Help Intelligence Report Spring 2011.

The invaluable Gene Lyons muses about the latter in Scrooge ain't broke and neither is the government Salon 03/09/2011:

Maybe instead of playing budgetary chicken with congressional Republicans, the White House should search carnival side shows and TV shopping channels for a Democratic Glenn Beck. Any glib pitchman could outline a Republican scheme to sabotage the U.S. economy to gain political power far more plausible than Beck's shaggy-dog conspiracies.

Posner's article calls attention to one of the stranger aspect of the scary-Muslims-are-coming-to-git-us conspiracy theory, the idea that Muslim jihadists are in cahoots with the left, however they conceive that term:

[Andrew] McCarthy [of National Review], author of the books The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America and How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda, links both President Obama and the American left to this supposed plot, claiming that they share collectivist goals. He told Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism in 2010 that "Islamists" and "leftists" share totalitarian goals, "totalitarian in the sense that they want to control every aspect of the individual’s life, and [are] virulently opposed to capitalism and individual liberty," adding that "even though they [Obama and Saudi King Abdullah] part company on the details of what they would transform it into, they both need to topple American constitutional republicanism in order to install their utopias."

Since the hard right sees "the left" - in which they include President Obama, of course - as anti-American and their enemies, this is largely about creating sort of unified theory of political evil to lump together "the left" and Muslim jihadists. While visions of the Black Panthers from the 1960s haunt their fantasies, what most American rightwingers call "the left" is really today's Democratic Party.

For people who want to be scammed by something this kooky to begin with, facts won't make any immediate difference. But here in the real world, it's absurd. In terms of ideology, Democrats in general and in particular people who see themselves as liberal or progressive Democrats have little at all in common with Muslim jihadists who support theocracy, oppose anything that looks like democracy or freedom of speech and press, oppose basic human rights for women and promote anti-Semitism. Not even the bitterest American critic of US foreign policy wants to be blown up by a terrorist bomber or plane hijacker acting in the name of what by any normal definitions is a rightwing political and religious ideology. And, to my knowledge, there aren't any cases in the US or Europe where groups that understand themselves as "left" have actively cooperated with Muslim jihadists.

Republicans oppose Muslim terrorism and, as Peter King is reminding us this week, hate Muslims and Islam much more generally. Simple patriotism and nationalism are involved. Political Christianism is all-but-universally accepted as an ideology in the Republican Party. And both history and "pro-Israel" Christian Zionist ideology make overt anti-Semitism far more problematic than promoting fear and hatred of Muslims. Still, there's a large religious (mainly Christian) component of the American Right's targeting of Islam and Islamism.

Muslim jihadist ideology as we know it today is ultra-conservative both in politics and within the Islamic religion. Less extreme forms of political Islam, from Hosni Mubarak's former ruling ideology to that of the ruling Islamist party in Turkey to the right's current bogeyman, the Muslim Brotherhood in its varied current incarnations tend toward conservative ideas: mixing politics and religion, a restrictive attitude toward women's rights, etc.

The Cheney-Bush Administration consistently voted with Muslim countries and the Vatican on family-planning programs in the UN, because Republicans like conservative Muslims and the Vatican don't want to promote abortion or birth control, and are dubious about the enhancements of women's status that accompany both. On issues of women's rights and other "culture war" issues in the American sense, Islamists are conspicuously conservative.

I'm not making a mirror-image point, i.e., "See? Its the Republicans who are in bed with Islamic extremists!" I'm just pointing out the reality that in terms of American politics, actual Islamism to the extent that it exists is political isolated from both Republicans and Democrats and from fringe groups of the left and the right. And on a broader scale, these are conservative movements. Reality still counts for something, even if you wouldn't think so from watching FOX News.

Tags: christian right, conspiracy theories, glenn beck, radical right, sarah posner

Foreign reporting on Glenn Beck's Whitestock rally

"By the time we got to Whitestock...": Pro-democracy demonstrators showed a presence, too

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) reports in Sarah Palin hat einen Traum (Sarah Palin has a dream) 28.08.2010:

Zwei Monate vor den Kongresswahlen in den USA machen Ultrakonservative und die religiöse Rechte mobil: Zehntausende Demonstranten haben sich am Samstag vor dem Lincoln Memorial in Washington versammelt, um gegen den angeblichen Zerfall nationaler und religiöser Werte zu protestieren. Damit dürfte - entgegen der Beteuerungen der Veranstalter das politische Establishment gemeint sein, vor allem Präsident Barack Obama.

[Two months before the Congressional elections in the USA the ultraconservatives and the Religious Right are mobilizing: tens of thousands of demonstrators assembled before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on Saturday to protest against the alleged collapse of national and religious values. That, despite the claims of the organizers that the political establishment was meant, was mainly directed against President Barack Obama.]

El Mundo (Spain) headlined, La ultraderecha toma Washington 47 años después del sueño de Martin Luther King (The ultra-right takes Washington 47 years after the Dream of Martin Luther King) 28.08.2010

Der Standard (Vienna) Washington: Rechte mobilisiert gegen Obama (The right mobilizes against Obama) 28.08.2010 with the caption "Ausgerechnet Sarah Palin will die 'Ehre Amerikas wiederherstellen'" (Sarah Palin of all people wants to "restore America's honor")

El País (Spain) Los ultraconservadores hacen una demostración de fuerza ante la estatua de Lincoln (Ultraconservatives have a strong demonstration in front of Lincoln's statue) 28.08.2010

Der Spiegel (Hamburg) Massendemo für Ehre und Glauben: US-Rechte mobilisieren Tausende gegen Obama (Mass demonstration for honor and faith: US rightists mobilize thousands against Obama) 28.08.2010. The caption says:

In Washington haben sich Tausende Ultra-Konservative versammelt, ausgerechnet am Jahrestag der "I have a dream"-Rede Martin Luther Kings. Die Hardliner demonstrieren gegen Präsident Obama - und für die "Ehre" der Nation.

[In Washington, thousands of ultraconservatives assembled, of all times on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. The hardliners are demonstrating against President Obama - and for the "honor" of the nation.]

Polémica y demostración de fuerza de la derecha conservadora en Washington (Polemics and a large demonstration by the conservative right in Washington) Clarín (Argentina) 28.08.2010 with the caption:

A pocos meses de las elecciones, una multitud del movimiento popular conservador "Tea Party" acusó a Obama de "racista contra los blancos". "No queremos una dictadura y el presidente está intentando eso en nuestro país", acusaron. Martin Luther King dio allí su discurso más famoso 47 años atrás.

[A few months before the elections, a multitud of the conservative popular movement "Tea Party" accuses Obama of being "racist against whites". "We don't want a dictatorship and the President intends to make one in our country," they accused. Martin Luther King gave his most famous speech there 47 years ago.]

Die Zeit (Hamburg), Zehntausende demonstrieren gegen Präsident Obama (Tens of thousands demonstrate against President Obama) 28.08.2010, with the caption:

In Washington protestieren Ultrakonservative und die religiöse Rechte – ausgerechnet am Lincoln Memorial. Vor 47 Jahren hielt Martin Luther King hier seine berühmte Rede

[In Washington, ultraconservatives and the Religious Right protest - of all places at the Lincoln Memorial. 47 years ago, Martin Luther King held his famous speech here]

La Journada (Mexico) Marchan conservadores en Washington a 47 años del "sueño" de Luther King (Conservatives march in Washington 47 years after the "dream" of Luther King) 28.08.2010:

La manifestación del Tea Party, agrupación de conservadores derechistas de tendencia populista, tenía lugar en el Lincoln Memorial, en el corazón de la capital ...

[The demonstration of the Tea Party, a group of rightwing conservatives with populist tendencies, took place at the Lincoln Memorial, in the hear of the Capital ...]

El Universal (Mexico), 'Anti Obama' inicia su protesta (The "Anti-Obama" begins his protest) with the caption:

Glenn Beck, comentarista del Fox News , reunió a varias personas para desacreditar la agenda de cambio del presidente Barack Obama y restablecer el honor y los valores en EU

[Glenn Beck, commentator for Fox News, assembled various figures to discredit President Obama's agenda of change and to re-establish the honor and values of the US]

Cadena SER (Spain) Miles de conservadores estadounidenses se manifiestan en Washington (Thousands of American conservatives rally in Wshington) with the caption:

La ultraderecha se ha manifestado en el mismo lugar en el que Martin Luther King pronunció su famoso discurso "Tengo un Sueño" hace 47 años

[The ultra-right demonstrated in the same place in which Martin Luther King made his famous "I Have A Dream" speech 47 years ago]

Tags: christian right, christianism, glenn beck, radical right

Glenn Beck and the Republicans

The neocon house organ The Weekly Standard has a cover story by Matthew Continetti on The Two Faces of the Tea Party: Rick Santelli, Glenn Beck, and the future of the populist insurgency 06/28/2010 issue; accessed 06/23/2010. Continetti is the author of The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star (2009).

The article is more than a little strange because Continetti is trying to square a circle. He's pointing out the painfully obvious, that Tea Party darling Glenn Beck is a crackpot far-right conspiracy theorist. But he also wants to treat Beck's extremism as essentially a public-relations problem for the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party, not as an anti-democracy demagogue. Here is how he puts his PR analysis:

The tensions within conservative populism are durable and longstanding. Consider two other faces. The first is Ronald Reagan’s: sunny, cheerful, conservative. Yet it is often forgotten that Reagan was the first Republican president to identify with FDR. He drew support from unions and other parts of the New Deal coalition. He left Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid intact. He was less concerned with undoing the work of his predecessors than he was with implementing reforms that promoted competition, investment, and growth. Not coincidentally, he was the most successful Republican president of the 20th century.

The second face is Barry Goldwater’s, circa 1964: tart, dyspeptic, radical. For Goldwater, "Extremism in the defense of liberty [was] no vice." For Goldwater, the aim was "not to pass laws, but to repeal them." It is no wonder that conservatives are attracted to such a message. But they are often the only ones who feel this way. Goldwater lost in a landslide.

The Tea Party cannot choose one face over the other; they are both part of the same movement. But the Tea Party can decide which face it puts forward. And in the coming days that decision will be of great consequence. It is the choice between Reagan and Goldwater. Santelli and Beck. Reform and revolution. Common sense and conspiracy. The future and the past. Victory—and defeat.

Continetti talks about the Tea Party movement as though it's something rather mysterious and amorphous. So he has to ignore what we do know about the Tea Party from the organizations identified with it and from the polling of people who identify themselves with the movement, i.e., that they are older, more-affluent-than-average white people (more men than women) who are loyal Republican voters. The Republican Party out of power, in other words.

It's true that Reagan was friendlier to the camera than Goldwater. I only heard Reagan speak live once, and I was surprised at how flat he sounded. Maybe he was having an off day. But it struck me that he came across much better on TV than in person. On TV, he could sound like a friendly but slightly dingy older relative.

His Reagan vs. Goldwater imagery is apt to his point. Because Reagan's political career was built on being a Goldwater Republican. When he was running for President in 1980, liberal critics reminded people that Reagan had embraced and still supported some of the most crackpot notions with which Goldwater had associated himself. He implemented the basics of the parts of that program that involved drastic deregulation of business, anti-union activism and structuring tax policy to drastically increase the maldistribution of wealth and income. But he took a flawed but pragmatic on adjusting Social Security taxes to cover the long-term needs of the program during the time that we are now entering. As bad as his 1981 tax cut was, his 1986 tax reform actually embraced liberal tax-reform approaches to reducing tax subsidies for various industries, though it didn't undo all the negative effects of the 1981 tax "supply-side" program. (Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis defended the 1986 Reagan tax reform in the 1988 Presidential race, while Old Man Bush vowed to change it in a subsidize-the-wealthy direction.) The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that he negotiated with the Soviet Union was a major step in nuclear arms control, as well as a step that greatly helped Mikhail Gorbachev proceed with his democratic reforms.

But Continetti is not invoke Reagan's image as a Social Security pragmatist, a liberal tax reformer, or an arms-control advocate. Hardline "movement conservatives" didn't like those moves at the time. And, as we saw with the Cheney-Bush administration, today's Republicans have no practical inclination to take such measures. Continetti is worried about marketing the Republican Party, of which the Tea Party is a currently very visible manifestation, while recognizing that they "cannot choose one face over the other; they are both part of the same movement." The Rick Santelli "face", which Continetti is promoting in this article, appeals largely to the same movement conservative base that Beck does.

Continetti description of Beck's extremism is unusual only in that it's coming from a staunchly conservative source. But it's an informative description. And it's explicit enough to dramatize how difficult it is to square the circle of welcoming those who are attracted to Beck's loony conspiracy theories and disjointed ranting while recognizing that his ideas have limited usage in implementing the mission that is the heart and soul of today's Republican Party: comforting the already very comfortable.

Here is part of how Continetti describes Tea Party ideological bigwig Glenn Beck:

Read and watch enough Glenn Beck, and you realize that he is not only introducing new authors and ideas into public life, he is reintroducing old ideas. Some very old ideas. The notion that America’s leaders are indistinguishable from America’s enemies has a long and sorry history. In the 1950s it led Robert Welch, the head of the John Birch Society, to proclaim that President Dwight Eisenhower was a Communist sympathizer. For this, William F. Buckley Jr. famously denounced Welch and severed the Birchers’ ties to mainstream conservatism. The group was ostracized for decades.

But not everyone denounced Welch. One author, the Mormon autodidact W. Cleon Skousen, continued to support the Birchers as he penned books on politics and the American founding. And Skousen continued to believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American political, social, and economic elites were working with the Communists to foist a world government on the United States.

Glenn Beck is a Skousenite. During the "We Surround Them" program, he urged his audience to read Skousen’s 5000 Year Leap (1981), for which he has written a foreword, and The Real George Washington (1991). “The 5000 Year Leap is essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did,” the author writes in Glenn Beck’s Common Sense. More controversially, Beck has recommended Skousen's Naked Communist (1958) and Naked Capitalist (1970), which lay out the writer’s paranoid scenarios in detail. The latter book, for example, draws on Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (1966), which argues that the history of the 20th century is the product of secret societies in conflict. "Carroll Quigley laid open the plan in Tragedy and Hope," says a character in Beck’s new novel, The Overton Window. "The only hope to avoid the tragedy of war was to bind together the economies of the world to foster global stability and peace." [my emphasis]

Continetti is overly generous to Beck and Skousen and unfair to Quigley here. Skousen milked Quigley's book in a typical example of the kind of pseudoscholarship that is typical of crackpot extremists. I discussed Skousen last year in Glenn Beck's political guru 09-21-09. The concluding essay in Quigley's 1966 book expresses conservative worries about the general decline of civilization due to dirty movies and novels that talk about sex, but it's clear that Quigley wasn't promoting anything like the paranoid crackpot worldview that Skousen used Quigley's book to justify.

For Beck, conspiracy theories are not aberrations. They are central to his worldview. They are the natural consequence of assuming that the world hangs by a thread, and that everyone is out to get you. On his television program, Beck promised to "find out what's true and what's not with the FEMA concentration camps"—referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a federal bureaucracy that chiefly funnels relief funds to victims of natural disasters, and is more commonly (and accurately) thought of as punchless. Beck later acknowledged that his staff could not find any evidence for such camps.

Beck has urged his viewers to read The Coming Insurrection, an impenetrable political tract by a French Marxist group called The Invisible Committee that has no clear relationship to U.S. politics (or to reality). In Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, the author writes that “efforts are now also being made to empower the State to retain, test, and research the blood and DNA of newborn babies.” The plot of The Overton Window is one big conspiracy theory in which the United States government, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and the Trilateral Commission are all plotting an antidemocratic coup. It is a fever-dream that Oliver Stone would envy. “Who needs a list when they can monitor you whenever they want?” says one of the book’s characters at a fictional Tea Party rally. “You've all heard of that ‘Digital Angel’ device that can be implanted under your skin, right? They say it’s to store medical information and for the safety of children and Alzheimer’s patients.” Scary stuff. But also fantastical. In an author’s note, Beck says his novel is not fiction but “faction”—“completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact.” Which “facts” are those? [my emphasis]

Continetti frames his analysis as looking for a solution to a (non-existent) mystery about who and what the Tea Party movement is. What he's really addressing is the political risks in the current phase of the longterm and continuing radicalization of the Republican Party.

Tags: glenn beck, radical right, republican party, tea party, w cleon skousen

Glenn Beck and isolationism

Andrew Bacevich is correct when he observes that "isolationism" is mostly used as a bogeyman in American national security debates. Neither the Democratic Party nor the Republicans have really been dominated by isolationists since the Second World War. Bacevich would probably argue that even those called isolationists in the 1930s really weren't exactly that. But I won't go there in this post.

But far-right isolationism does play a role in today's Republican Party. Its main effect is to reinforce the narrow nationalist impulses of the main tendencies in the Party, particularly the neoconservatives. Far-right isolationists, which include the John Birch Society, are just as hostile as neoconservatives are to the US being part of any international organizations, particularly the United Nations.

It's notable in that connection to see that as Glenn Beck plunges deeper and deeper into Bircher/Birther-style conspiracy theories, he's also embracing Bircher-style isolationism. Peter Wehner, posting at a blog for the leading neocon journal Commentary (Glenn Beck: Harmful to the Conservative Movement 09/21/09) writes that Beck:

... seems to be more of a populist and libertarian than a conservative, more of a Perotista than a Reaganite. His interest in conspiracy theories is disquieting, as is his admiration for Ron Paul and his charges of American “imperialism.” (He is now talking about pulling troops out of Afghanistan, South Korea, Germany, and elsewhere.) Some of Beck’s statements—for example, that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people”–are quite unfair and not good for the country. His argument that there is very little difference between the two parties is silly, and his contempt for parties in general is anti-Burkean (Burke himself was a great champion of political parties). And then there is his sometimes bizarre behavior, from tearing up to screaming at his callers. Beck seems to be a roiling mix of fear, resentment, and anger — the antithesis of Ronald Reagan. [my emphasis]

This is not a sign of the Republican Party being on the verge of embracing a non-interventionist foreign policy. It's one of the two sides of nationalist jingoism asserting itself against a Democratic President. If Beck is still around working the political-extremism racket the next time we have a Republican President, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if his isolationism quickly morphs into raving jingoism.

Not all isolationists are equal. Antiwar.com is a site that I've always had big reservations about exactly because it's run by rightwing libertarian isolationists. But they also run a lot of articles and do interviews on their Antiwar Radio service with Scott Horton (not the human rights lawyer) that include perfectly sensible and even left critics of US foreign policy, as well as some top journalists and historians. So it wouldn't be accurate to say it's a rightwing isolationist site. Although that description does fit Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of the site.

The American Conservative also falls into that category. It publishes left-liberal as well as libertarian-isolationist criticisms of US foreign policy, and is especially critical of neoconservatives. Taki's Magazine is more just straight rightwing isolationist. One of their most recent articles is The Forgotten Conservative by Nesta Bevan 09/22/09, which aims to revive the memory of Revilo Oliver, a long-time writer for the John Birch Society who became too rightwing for even the Birchers to stomach. Bevan writes:

Oliver and the John Birch Society came to a final parting in July 1966, after a speech by Oliver, “Conspiracy or Degeneracy?” which he delivered at the New England rally for God, Family, and Country. In this talk, Oliver asked whether the failure adequately to confront Western decline stemmed more from biological degeneracy or conspiracies that aim at our destruction. Suggesting that the former was more likely, he asked his audience to imagine that the Jews, a group he held in the forefront of the anti-Western conspiracy, “were vaporized at dawn tomorrow.” Would not the problems that had led to the present crisis, Oliver thought, soon recur? He was taken by hostile critics to have called for the extermination of the Jews, though this was not what he had said. Nevertheless, his position in the Society became untenable, and, after a bitter break with [JBS head Robert] Welch, he resigned.

The JBS was generally understood to be an anti-Semitic group. But they tried to keep at least a hair of a distance between themselves and explicitly anti-Semitic publish statements like Oliver's eliminationist speech cited there. Bevon says:

Given the record of his later years, it is small wonder that contemporary conservatives prefer to ignore Oliver. To do so, though, is a serious mistake; his thought continues to raise issues of vital concern to the Right.

And what might those be? Bevan explains:

An underlying theme in “Conservatism and Reality” came to the fore in his later work, and this again raises a fundamental issue. If, as Oliver does, one rejects religion as a guide to life, what is to replace it? For Oliver, the answer is clear: race is fundamental. In “History and Biology,” American Opinion [JBS magazine] (1963), Oliver highly recommends Lothrop Stoddard’s “The Revolt Against Civilization” Stoddard, “one of the most brilliant of American writers,” argued that the colored races pose a threat to the white race, and Oliver enthusiastically agrees. For him, racial struggle is primary, and he regards ethical obligations as limited to one’s own race. For him, this view was unquestionable. In response to a correspondent to National Review who asked why one should give primary emphasis to the needs of one’s own race, Oliver was puzzled. Was this not how everyone in fact acted?

So the fact that Beck may be using isolationist criticisms of US military interventions shouldn't mislead anyone into thinking that he's embracing some kind of left-right, out-of-the-box libertarian thinking. A far-right isolationist viewpoint can float in a sewer of anti-Semitism, racism and jingoism.

Tags: glenn beck, isolationism, john birch society, radical right

Glenn Beck's political guru

Willard Cleon Skousen (1913-2006)

When I wrote earlier that Glenn Beck was sounding like a straight-up John Birch Society fantasist, I didn't realize that he had publicly expressed his support for the group's recent paranoid campaign against the imaginary "NAFTA Superhighway", as Dave Neiwert describes in Glenn Beck chases "far left radicals" in White House, but loves right-wing radicals himself Crooks and Liars 09/17/09.

And the man who apparently is Beck's chief intellectual guru of the moment, one of whose books he recommends to anyone who will listen, is the late Willard Cleon Skousen, who is profiled by Alexander Zaitchik in Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life Salon 09/16/09. Skousen was a Morman rightwinger who taught at two Mormon universities and served for four years as the Salt Lake City chief of police, until the ultra-conservative mayor of the time fired him for being too hardline. "He operated the police department like a Gestapo," the mayor said.

Skousen in the early 1960s after being canned as police chief was involved with far-right groups like the Birchers' American Opinion Speakers Bureau, the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the All-American Society and the American Security Council. Zaitchik writes that Skousen in the early 1960s became "the nation's most prominent Birch defender." The Birchers were angry at Barry Goldwater's movement because the 1964 Republican Convention that selected Goldwater as its Presidential nominee also condemned the Birch Society which viewed former President Dwight Eisenhower as having been a Communist. The pique of the Birchers against Goldwater, despite his endorsement of many views to their liking, was probably not irrelevant to the fact that Goldwater's parents had been Jewish, though they had converted to Christianity.

The Skousen book that Beck so loves is The 5,000 Year Leap (1981). But he also made ripples in the sphere of far-right influence with other volumes like The Naked Communist, The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society, The Naked Capitalist (1970) and The Making of America (1982), the latter of which claimed that slaveowners had been the "worst victims" of the slavery system in the Old South.

As Zaitchik explains, the Mormon journal Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought in its Autumn-Winter 1971 issue published a symposium on The Naked Capitalist, which was receiving notable attention from conservative Mormon intellectuals. Dialogue has made the symposium available on its Web site, including a pitch by an admirer of Skousen's book and a response by Skousen himself. You can get a first-hand look there at the ideology on which Beck is operating and recommending to his followers as it looked during the first Nixon administration, long before the "teaparty" movement became a favorite media entertainment item.

Skousen's view of wealthy and evil capitalists behind behind the Communist movement is a long-time favorite far-right theory, with a conspiracy of Jews playing the main role of the capitalist manipulators in many of its versions. The Birchers then and now truck in nudge-nudge wink-wink theories which mirror anti-Semitic theories like that of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but don't directly call the conspirators "the Jews". Beck's bizarre concoction of Rockefeller the Communist art conspirator fits comfortably into this model. As historian Louis Midgley summarizes it in the Dialogue symposium:

The "global planners" who are at the center of the Capitalist conspiracy are identified by Skousen as the "leaders of the world's secret center of international banking," the "super-rich," the "super capitalists." The "leaders of London and Wall Street" are chiefs of "the Anglo-American secret society" who are behind communism and everything else. Skousen puts bankers at the top of the list of conspirators: the Rothschilds, Barings, Lazards, Paul Warburg, J. P. Morgan. But also included are the following: John Foster and Alan Dulles, the Rockefellers, Cecil Rhodes, Arnold Toynbee, Walter Lippman, Albert Einstein, George F. Kennan, Douglas Dillon, Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, Henry Cabot Lodge, Arthur Burns, George Ball, Ellsworth Bunker, Paul Hoffman, McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy family, Dwight Eisenhower, John Dewey, and many others. By any standards, this is quite a list.

The Rothschilds are favorite bogey-men in pretty much every anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. Kissinger is a more recent favorite. Albert Einstein, who described himself as a socialist of the social-democratic variety, fits into the picture - not that there has to be any actual sense about which Jewish names get stuck into these lists. (If the title of Skousen's 1967 book Fantastic Victory; Israel's Rendezvous with Destiny is any measure, I'm guessing he promoted some form of Christian Zionism. Though that certainly doesn't exclude anti-Semitism, since its more common versions look forward to the day when God will have most of the Jews in the world slaughtered in a big war, and the rest will convert to Christianity.)

In his Dialogue response, Skousen denies that he listed all those names in The Naked Capitalist. Midgley doesn't respond in his rejoinder. From the way Skousen worded his comment, my guess is that Skousen is comma-dancing. Midgley probably took those names as people mentioned in that context throughout the book. Skousen is denying he listed them that way.

The symposium gives a good glimpse of how crackpot "scholarship" works. Just as Mad Annie Coulter's books are filled with footnotes, Skousen used a book by Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time (1966) as a source, but used the material in a thorough dishonest and frivolous way. Crackpot conspiracy theories usually don't lack for "sources" and footnotes. On the contrary, neurotic application of such proofs is a hallmark of them.

I checked the nearest library to see if The Naked Capitalist was available; they didn't have a copy available of Skousen's self-published classic. They did have a copy of Tragedy and Hope. It looks as though it were written to be a college text. And though its concluding essay expresses conservative worries about the general decline of civilization due to dirty movies and novels that talk about sex, it's clear that Quigley wasn't promoting anything like the paranoid crackpot worldview that Skousen used his book to justify.

Louis Midgley seems to have had a good sense of how far-right paranoid conspiracy theories are constructed. But in that Dialogue article he does perpetuate a fuzzy-headed notion that Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg and other Republicans today also promote, a conceptual merger of socialism with fascism and Hitlerism:

I believe that Skousen started his career with the goal of saving the rich from big government, but has found that the rich don't want his help — the rich he now discovers control big government and, in fact, are rich partly because of big government. Now he wants to attack the rich and especially their power base, their wealth. But he is not the first to have it in for Capitalists and to want to save the people from their rich masters. This is exactly the program of various forms of socialism and communism. It is difficult to miss the parallels between Skousen's program and much of the rhetoric of the New Left. But there are other instructive parallels. In Germany, where they also once came to believe that they were oppressed by conspiratorial bankers who also manipulated the Communists, the program was called National Socialism. Under this program the rich would be eliminated and power given back to the people (or so they said), the schools would be liberated so that the truth could be taught about the evil bankers, international ties would be eliminated, churches would be used for national propaganda and other purposes. Skousen also wants a political party to come to power with the express goal of eliminating the wealth and power of the rich (what better name for such a policy than socialism?) and this key process is to be accomplished by national governmental action — an appropriate descriptive title for his program would be National Socialism.

Without trying to recap decades of German history, Hitler added the word "socialist" to his party's name to make it the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) from the German initials; "Nazi" is a typical German shortening of the Party's name. The purpose was to attract more attention from working-class voters, who heavily supported either the Social Democratic Party (SDP) or the Communists (KPD). The NSDAP never took many voters directly from the SPD or the KPD. The SDP and the KPD both understood that the Nazis did not share either of their basic social, economic or political outlooks, as did the Nazis themselves. And the SPD and the KPD each rejected the other's version of socialism. Merging the concepts of Nazism, socialism and communism makes them basically impossible to understand.

But it is clear that Skousen and his disciple Glenn Beck have a political-paranoid, far-right vision of the world that has very much in common with that of the John Birch Society. So its not surprising that Beck would be raving on TV about Rockefeller sponsored Communist art to subliminally convert unsuspecting passers-by to socialismcommunismfascismliberalism.

According to this National Review Online article by Mark Hemingway, Romney’s Radical Roots 08/06/07, Mitt Romney is also a Skousen fan.

I see that Salon is running a 3-part series on "The making of Glenn Beck" by Alexander Zaitchik beginning on 09/21/2009.

Tags: glenn beck, john birch society, radical right, w cleon skousen

Does Glenn Beck think the Prophet Micah was a Communist?

FOX News commentator Glenn Beck in this video clip of 09/02/09 is adopting the John Birch Society notion of Rockefeller as a Communist. Apparently you can pick any Rockefeller for the purpose. Since Beck (in good Bircher style) routinely conflates liberalism, communism, fascism and socialism, he thinks some Rockefeller or other was a fascist communist, too.



This would be funny if he weren't one of the most influential commentators among the Republican base. Although the content is anything but honest or rational, millions of Republicans take it as seriously as a heart attack. And among the hardcore "Patriot militia" type groups, they see even Glenn Beck as part of the Liberal Press establishment. So when they hear him spouting stuff like this, they are inclined to think that if "even Glenn Beck" is talking this way, things must be much worse than they thought.

What particularly struck me about this video is his expressed outrage over an sculpture of a man beating a sword into a plowshare. Although he bizarrely notes that he has a copy of the sculpture because he likes it. He explains that the sculpture was donated by the USSR to the United Nations, which sits on land donated by some Rockefeller. In the Bircher/Birther worlds, that a triple-supply of Communism there, the USSR, the UN and Rockefeller.

I'm pretty sure Glenn Beck and his fans don't much care. But that very swords-into-plowshares image was part of a leading symbol of the democratic opposition in the DDR (Communist East Germany):

The small print says "Micha 4", a reference to the 4th chapter of Micah in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Micah 4:3 says, in the New Oxford Annotated version:

He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations afar off;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more;

At around 8:10 in the video, Beck kinda-sorta starts quoting Scripture. He does like to pose a big defender of Christianity, after all. You might think he wouldn't want to ridicule a concept straight out of the Christian Bible, even if he had been used at times by people of whom he disapproved. But you would obviously be wrong. Or maybe quotations from the Hebrew Bible are a little too "Jewish" for Beck's taste.

No, he didn't say anything overtly anti-Semitic in this little Bircher rant. But generally, when people start yapping about Rockefeller the Communist, some Jewish conspiracy theory is usually involved. Or a conspiracy of The Insiders, as the Birch Society founder Robert Welch called them.

This clip of Beck is a classic case of the "paranoid style" of political propaganda. It probably wouldn't pass muster as a high school paper, since it's logic and use of evidence are so pitiful. But, again, this is a credible commentator among Republicans. It would be a mistake to assume that because it's vapid or even because some Republicans might laugh with delight at its goofiness, that Republicans aren't taking stuff like this seriously. They do.

His shtick in this presentation turns around something he presents as though it were a shocking revelation, though it's actually one of the best-known incidents in 20th century art history, the Diego Rivera mural commissioned for the Rockefeller Center in the 1930s that John D. Rockefeller ordered removed because of its perceived leftwing imagery. Somehow, this story in which Rockefeller had the mural by the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera (who was a co-founder of the Mexican Communist Party) removed from the Rockefeller Center is used by Beck as evidence of Rockefeller's Communist sympathies. Go figure.

He also refers to a relief at the Rockefeller Center depicting one figure holding a hammer and another holding a sickle and equates that with the Soviet hammer-and-sickle symbol, though he doesn't show anything remotely resembling the hammer-and-sickle symbol in the relief. He refers to another relief of a Roman charioteer for which he makes an even more obscure interpretation as an Italian fascist symbol because the charioteer is holding out his hand. (!?!) In Beck's bizarre political cosmology, communist and fascist and progressive and Rockefeller and the USSR and the Untied Nations mean more or less the same thing.

Does Beck himself believe this nonsense? Is he deliberately conning his audience? I'm not sure it makes any difference. Fanaticism can be a powerful thing.

Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times comments on the Beck performance in Glenn Beck and the Society for (In)sanity in Art 09/03/09.

Tags: glenn beck, radical right