Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (14 page)

During another show, Beck had workers in the Fox control room wear purple SEIU shirts, posing as goons. His staff got another dress-up day when Beck had them wear white lab coats and stand with him as he pointed to his chalkboard, where there was an illustration about how the whole world was becoming more socialist, “going for an even more oppressive and bloated government.” Beck beckoned to his white coats. “The doctors know. I mean, they actually don’t but having them stand here makes it seem like I’m right, doesn’t it? Worked for Barack Obama. Why isn’t it working for me?” The “doctors” stood silently, arms folded on chests.

When it appeared that the White House wasn’t getting the message that the stimulus plan wasn’t working, Beck tried to amplify his message—by using a bullhorn on the set. To dramatize White House adviser Dunn’s speech to high school students praising Mao, Beck invited a parent of one of the private-school children who heard the speech on the show to criticize Dunn. He had the father shot in silhouette, as if he were in the witness protection program, and distorted his voice so he sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. “Concerned Parent,” the father was labeled on-screen.

“Mao would have preferred to silence the opposition by putting a bullet to the back of the head,” the concerned parent/chipmunk said. “There are subtle ways to do it, and I think we’re seeing it right now.”

Such as dousing people with gasoline on TV?

Still, no chipmunks, fish, frogs, or dogs compare to the strange animals viewers saw on their screens one evening in July 2009. It began as one of Beck’s fairly common rants against AmeriCorps, the community service program created by Bill Clinton and embraced by Obama.

“Do you remember when Barack Obama was on the campaign trail and he said, ‘Oh I’m going to have an army of people in America and they’ll be better financed than the military’?”

No, we don’t remember that, but go on.

“I think AmeriCorps is part of that army,” Beck explained. “And they—you know, I got the pledge and I was going to read it to you, but I thought, you know, I can’t really read it to you, you know, sitting here like this.”

With that, Beck jumped up from his desk and ripped off his jacket to reveal a full lederhosen ensemble: the knickers, the long socks, and the vest.

“I mean, to really go for it, I mean, to really do the AmeriCorps pledge, I think you have to be dressed like this. I think—I think you have to stand up and take your pledge.”

He raised his hand and made a three-finger salute. He pledged: “I will get things done for America, to make our people safer, and smarter, and healthier. I will bring Americans together to strengthen our communities. Faced with apathy, I will take action. Faced with conflict, I will seek common ground. Faced with adversity, I will persevere. I will carry this commitment with me this year and beyond. I am an AmeriCorps member, and I will get things done.”

Beck then broke into the song “Edelweiss” from
The Sound of Music
.

This performance earned the host a curtain call on Bill O’Reilly’s show.

“Why the German outfit?” O’Reilly asked. “Why the Edelweiss? Why? This is AmeriCorps; this is America.”

“Yes, I don’t know,” Beck answered. “I think it’s about time that we used ridicule in this country.”

“Who are you ridiculing? The Germans? The AmeriCorps people?”

Beck explained that “if Rahm Emanuel gets his way,” AmeriCorps “will be required service” for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds. There are no such plans for the program to be anything other than voluntary.

O’Reilly, usually in sync with Beck on philosophy, told him that “I’m not with you on the AmeriCorps.”

O’Reilly later in the interview posed a reasonable question. “You do a lot of this kind of whacked-out stuff, the dancing with the lederhosen and interviewing yourself. Do you run a risk that some people are just going to dismiss the serious stuff that you’re doing, the important points you’re trying to make, because of the burlesque?”

“Yes, I do run that risk,” Beck retorted. “But have you seen the ratings at 5
P.M
.? Okay? [You] don’t get those ratings at 5
P.M
. by being Charlie Rose.”

“I have to say that when I saw this in my office,” O’Reilly said of the lederhosen episode, “I thought you were back on the sauce.”

“It could happen at any time,” Beck replied.

“Number two, I said to myself, is this the Hitler Youth thing he’s doing? You know, because the Hitler Youth had the little short pants.”

“Yes, but that’s lederhosen there. That’s completely different.”

“Beck, I think it was the Hitler Youth thing,” O’Reilly charged.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bill O’Reilly.”

Good thing Beck didn’t have a gas can with him.

CHAPTER 12
PAGING AGENT MULDER

Glenn Beck woke up on the morning of March 3, 2009, and took a walk out onto a grassy knoll. He went on
Fox & Friends
, the Fox News morning show, and spoke words that, until that moment, had been confined to shows such as
The X-Files
, not cable news. He said it just might be true that the Obama administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency was staffing and maintaining concentration camps to imprison political dissenters as part of a plan to suspend the Constitution.

“We are a country that is headed toward socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest imagination,” he proffered. “I wanted to debunk these FEMA camps. I’m tired of hearing about them. You know about them. I’m tired of hearing about them. I wanted to debunk them. We’ve now for several days done research on them. I can’t debunk them.”

In fact, he suggested, he seemed to believe in the camps himself. “If you trust our government, it’s fine,” he continued. “If you have any kind of fear that we might be heading towards a totalitarian state: Look out. Buckle up. There’s something going on in our country that is—ain’t good.”

By the time Beck walked onto the set that evening for his 5
P.M
. show, something weird had happened. He decided to clam up. Probably something involving Lee Harvey Oswald and the Trilateral Commission.

“I was going to talk about it today, but as I came in this morning and then I went into my office and I was looking at all the research that are being compiled, and it wasn’t complete,” he explained. “And I am not willing to bring something to you that is half-baked. If these things exist, that’s bad, and we will cover it. If they don’t exist, it’s irresponsible to not debunk this story.”

But given that Beck had already said he couldn’t debunk the story about the U.S. Department of Concentration Camps, this comment only added to the intrigue, and implied more validity to the rumor. “We have an independent group on this program looking into it, turning over every stone,” the host said. “I am going to bring you this story. This program is not beholden—This is going to drive the conspiracy theorists crazy. They’re making me say this. Help!—this program is not beholden to anybody. We answer to ourselves. I answer to me. I lost sleep last night worrying about this story, thinking about this story, and wanted to make sure I got it right.”

As a teaser, though, Beck said there was news that “fits together like a puzzle” and “it all adds up to government control.” He then introduced his guest, libertarian former presidential candidate Ron Paul, who added to the suspicion:

“FEMA is already very, very powerful and they overrule [local authorities] when they go in on emergencies. So in some ways, they can accomplish what you might be thinking about setting up camps. And they don’t necessarily have to have legislation, you know, to do the things that we dread, but it’s something that deserves attention.”

“Right,” Beck said. “And I want to make it very clear: I’m not fearing these things are happening.”

No, he was just saying he “can’t debunk” the allegation that they were, in fact, happening—and that was all many on the far right needed to confirm their belief that Obama was seeking to suspend the Constitution and imprison them for disagreeing with him.

Beck might as well have issued a call to arms to the dormant militia movement: The Obama administration is coming to get you. It was a case study in how he has brought the far-out fringes of the Internet into the mainstream in a way no other person in the news business has done.

Still, there was a delicious irony in Beck’s elevation of the concentration camp conspiracy theory to legitimate news story. To the extent anybody in the U.S. government did contemplate such a scheme, it was none other than Beck’s colleague at Fox News, Ollie North.

The FEMA concentration camp story has floated around for a quarter century or more. The closest it ever came to reality was in 1987, when the Iran-Contra investigation was under way and the
Miami Herald
published a breathless story:

REAGAN ADVISERS RAN “SECRET” GOVERNMENT

President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.

Investigators believe that the advisers’ activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the contras now under investigation.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a national crisis, such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.

Aha! It was Colonel North, in the eighties, with the secret FEMA plan. And now he’s hosting Fox’s
War Stories
.

The
Herald
reported that North’s idea involved a “secret contingency plan that called for … turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”

This, in turn, was similar to a plan drafted by the Nixon administration, in 1970, which proposed a declaration of martial law if there were an uprising by black militants; at least 21 million African Americans would be placed in “assembly centers or relocation camps.”

North’s brainstorm was shot down by cooler heads in the Reagan administration. The colonel himself, in congressional testimony, denied advocating such a plan and said the government had adopted no such plan.

But the story still proved embarrassing, winding up as Soviet propaganda; the Russian news agency Tass reported on plans to suspend the Constitution “in the interests of protecting the rears of the aggressive policy of the military-industrial complex.”

It was eventually forgotten, except among the conspiracy theorists. In the 1998
X-Files
movie, Agent Fox Mulder was told that “FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. It allows creation of a non-elected government. Think about that, Agent Mulder.”

During the Bush years, when Michael “Brownie” Brown’s FEMA couldn’t handle a hurricane, much less the secret imprisonment of millions of political dissenters, the conspiracy theory didn’t gain much traction. But then came Obama’s inauguration, and Beck’s arrival at Fox News. It was time for
The X-Files
to meet mainstream journalism.

Even a number of conservatives were appalled. “What the hell is going on at Fox News?” former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in a blog post after Beck’s “can’t debunk” moment. Frum also wasn’t pleased to see that Beck, during an hour-long “televangelical special” on Fox the week before, had given each audience member what Frum said was a book written by a John Bircher and a “grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller.”

Apparently Beck couldn’t debunk this one-world-government conspiracy, either.

“Are we headed for one world government?” he asked at the top of a later show, in October 2009. “America, if you believe this country is great but you—you’re not really into that whole one world government thing, watch out—because the masks are coming off.”

Beck alleged that White House officials were trying to “fundamentally transform this country into something revolutionary, almost Venezuelan in nature.” He predicted that the government would fail, and “mark my words, it’s the IMF or the U.N. Government and even bigger government will come to the rescue.”

The night’s topic: global warming. Beck’s guest, a conservative British gadfly known as Lord Christopher Monckton, had been invited on to talk about his conspiracy theory that, as Beck put it, “is on fire on the Internet.”

From Copenhagen, Monckton said, “A treaty will be signed that will, for the first time, create a world government with powers to intervene directly in the economy and in the environmental affairs of individual nations.”

“What page is the global government on” in the treaty? Beck asked.

“Right. You go to Annex 1, Paragraph 38.”

The other guest, former Bush adviser John Bolton, tried to inject some reason into the proceedings. He pointed out, correctly, that countries were “not prepared to sign on” to the sort of thing Monckton was talking about.

“With respect,” Monckton replied, “I think we are heading here for what could be a global government.”

Beck sided with his conspiracy-minded guest. “I really believe we have a group of radicals in the White House now, and in and around Washington, that are pushing for redistributive wealth, Marxism, socialism, global government,” he said. “I mean it’s all there.”

In the end, neither a global government nor anything of substance emerged from the Copenhagen talks.

Developing the world-government-takeover panic, Beck has relied on the work of the kindred spirits at the far-right Web site World Net Daily. On May 18, 2010, for example, Beck appeared on
Fox & Friends
to deliver word that “we are moving into a global community” and that “there is global governance coming to the planet.” Four days later, Henry Lamb, who runs a group devoted to world-government fears called Sovereignty International, penned a column on World Net Daily starting with the words “Hooray for Glenn Beck! Right out there in front of God and everybody, he talks about global governance as a real and present danger.” Lamb went on to cite a 1997 quotation from the head of the World Resources Institute and a 1976 report by the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements.

Three days after Lamb’s column, Beck was back on the air, proclaiming that “we are headed towards global governance.” Without mentioning Lamb or World Net Daily, Beck’s monologue included the very same 1976 and 1997 quotations from Lamb’s column.

Still, the global-governance panic was but a faint echo of the FEMA concentration camp hysteria.

On March 26, 2009, more than three weeks after setting the conspiracy world on fire with this “can’t debunk” claim, Beck was back on the air with the story. “America, we have a real problem in this country,” he said. “We don’t know what the truth is anymore.”

Now, why might that be?

He said he asked his guest, James Meigs from
Popular Mechanics
, to investigate the FEMA thing. And Meigs said, “It looks, from our early reporting, like a classic conspiracy theory.” That still wasn’t enough, and Beck said he’d have Meigs back in a couple of weeks.

He made good on his promise, and on April 6, Meigs reported that the buildings in Wyoming that were supposed to be part of the alleged concentration camps had either been boarded up, knocked down, or were being used to repair trains.

“Well, Auschwitz had trains,” Beck said. “I’m just saying.”

“But once you go down that road, if somebody wants to be convinced of that, they can’t really debunk that,” Meigs pointed out. He also noted that the woman who had narrated the Internet video purporting to show a FEMA concentration camp with gas chambers was a militia movement leader who recommended that her followers “march on Washington and start executing senators.”

These are the people Beck had given a national television audience.

“One last question,” he said. “Take a look at this picture … Is this what they claim? This is a concentration camp?”

“Yes, it is,” Meigs answered.

“Are there atrocities going on in that camp?”

“There is every reason to believe there is,” Meigs answered.

“Is this a government-run concentration camp where atrocities—every reason to believe atrocities are going on?”

“Yes.”

Beck left this story hanging until the next day’s show, when he finally let Meigs say that the concentration camp in the photo was located … in North Korea. Meigs said somebody used the photo, from a human rights group’s report, “slapped the Department of Homeland Security logo on it and claimed that these are on American soil.”

And that Photoshop expert was elevated by Beck to a national newsmaker, as the Fox News host hinted and implied for more than a month that the Obama administration was operating a concentration camp for political dissidents.

Weeks later, Fox’s O’Reilly asked Beck about a column by Paul Krugman in the
New York Times
saying Beck “warned viewers the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s totalitarian agenda.”

“I never said that,” Beck replied.

No, he said that his research “can’t debunk” the concentration camps and, in the next breath, advised those viewers who “fear that we might be heading towards a totalitarian state: Look out. Buckle up. There’s something going on in our country that is—ain’t good.”

No doubt many Beck viewers missed his carefully crafted reversal and still believe today that Obama operates his own Auschwitz for political opponents.