Glenn Beck Make America Great Again
Glenn Brook looks like the dad in a Disney picture show. He'southward earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His thought of salty linguistic communication is bullcrap.
The atmosphere at Beck's Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the fix of The Glenn Brook Plan, which airs on Brook's website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office every bit it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell impress of a Boy Sentinel.
On one side of the principal stage hung a drawing of an old pickup truck, captioned "Edward Janssen Farms." (Janssen was Brook's maternal grandfather; Beck's family sells a line of American-made clothing that bears the Janssen name.) Over the truck, in large blazon, was the discussion honor. On the other side of the phase sat an old-fashioned radio and a comfy blue armchair. The scene was warmly reassuring, except for the television offstage, which was blaring an advert for a twelvemonth'due south worth of "emergency survival food" to be consumed in case gild unravels.
Beck asked an audience member to lead a prayer, then filming started. Someone asked, "How do we get people to come together?" Beck responded by citing a book called Pendulum, which argues that as the result of generational change, history shifts in 40-twelvemonth cycles between "me" eras and "nosotros" eras. In 2003, he explained, America entered a "we" era, a time when private identity weakens and group identity strengthens. " 'We' generations," Beck declared, produce "genocidal monsters": The past three "we" generations coincided with the French and American revolutions, Karl Marx and the Civil War, and the Holocaust. Americans tin can survive the coming "onslaught," he reassured his viewers, just to exercise so will require dandy character. He mentioned Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged for resisting the Nazis. He invoked Gandhi, who fasted in an endeavour to prevent India's Hindus and Muslims from murdering each other. So Beck stopped for a commercial interruption, during which he chatted amiably with his audience about the impending plummet of America'due south banks.
Later in the evidence, a questioner suggested that Americans were turning away from God. Beck said he'd been thinking a lot about the prophet Jeremiah, who vainly warned the Israelite kings that catastrophe was most. Finally, when the Babylonians were about to sack Jerusalem, Jeremiah urged the Israelites to accept national enslavement, because it was God'due south will. Beck saw a contemporary lesson: "Sometimes you accept to pay the price for what y'all've done." Then he started talking about Donald Trump's set on on the Bill of Rights.
Among the misery of the 2016 presidential campaign, Beck showed unusual backbone. Many conservative pundits opposed Trump. But they by and large worked for mainstream media institutions like The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN. They didn't rely on Trump supporters to pay their bacon.
Bourgeois talk-bear witness hosts, who stoke right-wing populism for a living, reacted very differently. Sean Hannity appeared in one of Trump's campaign videos. Laura Ingraham spoke at the Republican National Convention. Rush Limbaugh declared in March that, "with the example of Trump, there's a much bigger upside than downside." In July, Hugh Hewitt wrote, "Of form I am voting for Donald Trump."
Even the nearly moralistic conservative talkers—including William Bennett and Dennis Prager, who have made careers of arguing that individual character is key to political leadership—endorsed Trump. Marker Levin, who hosts a popular show on the Westwood One radio network, vowed not to. "Count me equally Never Trump," he declared in Apr. Only in September he announced, "I'm voting for Trump."
Among big-time national conservative talk-prove hosts, Beck—who is tied with Levin for the third-largest listenership afterward Limbaugh and Hannity—was a rare exception. He didn't just oppose Trump. He compared him to Hitler. He warned that Trump was a possible "extinction-level upshot" for American democracy and commercialism. In an attempt to defeat Trump, Brook campaigned during the primaries for Ted Cruz. Then, when Cruz endorsed Trump, Beck apologized for having supported him.
One longtime sponsor of Brook's radio show reportedly tried to pull its ads in protest. In May, SiriusXM briefly suspended Brook for implying that if Congress wouldn't finish a President Trump, Americans might accept to practise and so by force. Nonetheless, Beck held firm in his opposition. He considered voting for Hillary Clinton, but ultimately went for the independent candidate Evan McMullin. Why?
The answer lies in the very catastrophizing that makes Beck sound like a kook. In the mid-1990s, Beck was, by his own business relationship, a "despicable human being," a divorced, alcoholic, drug-addicted shock jock for a Connecticut radio station. He one time put on a banana arrange and leaped into a pool of Styrofoam. He repeatedly considered suicide.
Somewhen Beck got sober and fell in love with the woman who would become his 2d wife. Simply she refused to marry him until they found a organized religion. So the couple embarked on a "church tour" and were baptized as Mormons in 1999.
For a time, Beck remained apolitical. "I didn't pay attention to anything until September 11, nothing, nil," he explained to me later on the taping, as we sat in his office. "I couldn't have told you the Bill of Rights in whatsoever great detail." He describes ix/11 as "a turning point for me." He was by and so hosting a show in New York, and remembers walking from Footing Zero to his studio and reading on air a 19th-century hymn written by a Mormon pioneer fleeing Missouri on his fashion to Utah. Beck says he felt a special calling at that moment. "If you have a position on the gate and you don't warn the people of what you see," he remembers thinking, "yous're to blame."
Ever since, Beck has imagined himself as a lookout perched on the national ramparts, alarm of looming disaster. Usually, that disaster manifests itself as a threat to the Constitution. Which, given Mormon history, makes perfect sense. Many Americans revere the Constitution. Mormons, however, consider information technology sacred. In Doctrine and Covenants, a book of Mormon scripture, God says, "I have established the Constitution of this state past the hands of wise men whom I raised upward unto this very purpose." According to polling by David Campbell, a Notre Dame political scientist, 94 per centum of American Mormons believe that the "Constitution and the Pecker of Rights are divinely inspired." That's only 2 points lower than the percentage who believe that the Book of Mormon is.
Simply Mormons don't only consider the Constitution sacred. They believe that its violation has allowed their persecution. Why did the governor of Missouri in 1838 telephone call for Mormons to "exist exterminated or driven from the State"? Why were Mormons forced to travel halfway across the continent—leaving the borders of what was then the United States—in order to find sanctuary in Utah? Because America'southward leaders disregarded the country'south sacred texts.
Today, many Mormons see defending the Constitution the style many Jews meet opposing genocide: as a way of honoring their ancestors and affirming their identity. In recounting his own religious conversion, Beck told me near a parade that he claimed Mormon settlers held upon reaching Utah, subsequently having been expelled from the United States. "The women carried the Declaration of Independence and the men carried the Constitution," he said. "And the whole betoken was that people may let you down, people will violate the principles, but the principles are true." Such a parade probable never happened. Ii scholars of Mormonism told me they had never heard of it. But the story nonetheless illustrates the Constitution'south centrality to Brook's identity, and to the identity of many Mormons. According to fable, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith prophesied in 1843 that the Constitution would one day "hang past a thread" and be saved by "the elders of Zion," past which he meant Mormon men. Church authorities say the quote is apocryphal. Campbell's polling, all the same, finds that a majority of Mormons believe it's true.
And still, Campbell argues, Mormons tend not to accentuate these views publicly. Mormon culture, he told me, emphasizes a "moderate way of speaking." Recollect Paw Romney or Orrin Hatch. Campbell, who is Mormon himself, says that'southward in part because many Mormons are desperate to be accepted by a mainstream that has long rejected them. They're fearful of looking like fanatics or nuts.
Beck is non. Perhaps considering he converted to Mormonism as an adult, he never imbibed his co-religionists' anxiety. He has publicly invoked Smith'south alleged prophecy at least five times, most recently in March. Warning Utah voters of the threat Trump posed, Beck reminded them that "the body of the priesthood is known to stand upward when the Constitution hangs by a thread." More problematically for liberals, Brook invoked the prophecy three times in belatedly 2008 and early 2009 to describe Barack Obama.
This is the irony underlying Beck's current stance: The same doomsday sensibility that helps him capeesh the menace posed by Trump led him to massively exaggerate the menace posed by Obama—and thus to breed the hateful paranoia on which Trump now feeds. Beck, in fact, pioneered some of Trump'southward most disturbing themes. At the beginning of Obama'south commencement term, Beck repeatedly called the president antiwhite. In 2010, he wondered why Obama "needlessly throws his hat into the band to defend the Ground Zero mosque. He hosts Ramadan dinners, which a president can do. But then y'all just add all of this stuff up—his wife goes against the advice of the advisers, jets to Spain for holiday. What does she do there? She hits upward the Alhambra palace mosque. Fine, information technology's a tourist allure. Merely is there anything more to this? Are they sending letters?"
Trump opponents may capeesh Beck's Hitler analogies now that they're directed at The Donald. Just during the first fourteen months of the Obama assistants, according to Dana Milbank'due south book Tears of a Clown: Glenn Brook and the Tea Bagging of America, Beck and guests on his Fox News evidence invoked "fascism," "Nazis," "Hitler," "the Holocaust" and "Joseph Goebbels" 487 times. For good measure, Brook in 2007 said that Hillary Clinton sounds like "the stereotypical bitch."
Beck says he'southward sorry for all that. "I played a role, unfortunately," he told Megyn Kelly during a 2014 interview on Fox News, "in helping tear the country apart." He told me that now that America has "hit the iceberg," he wants to help it heal. "I'm not the guy yous desire at the showtime of the ride on the Titanic, considering I'thou the guy going out and saying, 'We're going to hit water ice,' " he explained. "But once she starts going down, I'm the guy who would exist standing at the lifeboats maxim, 'Relax, it's going to be okay. Let's get the women and the children in the boats. Allow's non tear each other apart.' "
Although still generally conservative, Brook now insists that America's real moral divide isn't between left and right. He recently angered some conservatives by sending aid to undocumented children detained at the Mexican border. In a New York Times op-ed this fall, he called on conservatives to show "empathy" for Black Lives Matter activists. He says Americans must stop thinking in terms of ideological sides.
The day after Trump's victory, I checked in with Brook again. He said he saw "the seeds of what happened in Germany in 1933." The question was whether the American people would "water them" with "hatred and division." Did he feel partly responsible? "I'll not only take my share of blame, I'll accept extra," he answered. "If you desire to blame me for him, that'due south fine; I don't believe information technology'southward true, but it'due south fine with me. Delight only mind to the warnings now so we don't continue to exercise this."
When Barack Obama rose to the presidency later on insisting, "At that place is non a blackness America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there'south the U.s. of America," Glenn Beck called him a racist. Now that Donald Trump is president, Beck wants to demark the country's racial and ideological wounds. He really does.
But for years and years, he called sheep wolves. Now that the wolf is hither, it may be too late.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/glenn-becks-regrets/508763/
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