Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

[Lorien]

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



Sept. 16, 2009 | On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America's new breed of angry conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

More (really chilling stuff); http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

[percussivemadness]

1. how about this chap...

[Lorien]

3. From page 2 of the article:

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan."

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

2. That's so adorable Glenn Douche has his own version of Leo Strauss. nt

[imdjh]

4. Michael Medved was claiming 1.8M tbagrs yesterday, and when corrected said the number didn't matter.

[Lorien]

5. This article goes way beyond the teabaggers

to an underlying philosophy that's a hell of a lot worse than most of us realize.

[imdjh]

6. Yeah, but he was claiming 1.8 million tbgrs on the Mall. Crediting some university estimate.

[grantcart]

7. Cleon Skousen - haven't heard that name in 40 years

[bbgrunt]

8. ...looks a lot like Greenspan. nt

[SammyWinstonJack]

15. .

:evilgrin:

[Johonny]

9. Jim beam?

[UTUSN]

10. K&R #6. Thanks for this forever source. Much better than TimeMag's current article on BecKKK!1 n/t

[PA Democrat]

13. Wasn't that a piece of "fair and balanced" bullshit?

[Lorien]

14. What did they have to say about him? Were they trying to make his views

appear "mainstream"?

[PA Democrat]

16. It seemed like it was an attempt to excuse Beck's deplorable behavior

by painting Olbermann and others on the left as equally bad. They pointed out that off-camera he expressed much less radical views, and implied that his on-air shtick is all about providing entertainment in exchange for a big fat lump of money, so it's OK. He apparently made about $23 million last year, and that is to be admired regardless of how he made that money.

The author stated that Beck was claiming that his 9-12 rally drew 1.7 million and people on the left claimed it was only 70,000, while it was actually D.C. fire officials who provided the 70,000 estimate. Rather than providing an HONEST assessment of the crowd size, the author basically said who knows which side to believe.

The article reminded me of the sorry state of affairs that passes for TV news today. Both sides of every argument must be presented equally even when one side is completely bogus. There must be no conclusion drawn based upon the actual facts, just provide both sides without pointing out lies or distortions.

Here's a link to the article if you want to check it out.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1924348,00.html

[Lorien]

17. Both sides aren't presented equally. That only happened when we had the

Fairness Doctrine. It sounds like Time is , as most "news" organizations are these days, not only biased to the Right but filled with sloppy, lazy reporters. "Who knows which side to believe"? That the whole point of journalism; to find the truth! Somewhere alone the way they all seem to have forgotten that.

[UTUSN]

20. What did Time say about him? No profile, Just a recitation of his financial success, statistics

How many radio stations he's on (400+). How many #1 best sellers (3). How he's beating even O'LOOFAH in the ratings. How he's got a plan FOR YEARS to do books "targeting ALL age groups."

The only tidbit was that he got hooked on broadcasting when his mother gave im a Golden Age of Boradcasting record and that she committed suicide. The two factoids stand next to each other, like, leaving it up to us to decide whether there was a causal factor, like, she committed suicide because she realized she had created a monster.

The article is in the first link embedded in this link below. Also, there is another thread where the author of the Time piece "digs himself a deeper hole," where he admits he doesn't know much about anything, never watches OLBERMANN, has NEVER seen MADDOW. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6578090


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6570373

[Confusious]

11. Can we sue FOX for putting an insane person on TV?

Just askin'

[PA Democrat]

12. Skousen's views were rejected as radical by the mainstream conservatives

of his time. Beck has merely repackaged Skousen's ideology for mass consumption on FOX with scary music and special effects. Today, Beck is considered mainstream by the Republican Party which speaks volumes as to how far to the right the country has shifted. Senator Grassley told his constituents to read Beck's book.

[dugaresa]

18. anyone that claims slave owners got the bad end of the deal in slavery is sick

i read the article and am astounded at what a fringe lunatice this Skousen was. The idea that Beck loves him is even scarier and that he is reviving this guy's looney ideas.

[Lorien]

22. I don't think that most people here are reading that far into it

they seem to be just glancing over the clip that I posted. The whole story would have made their blood run cold!

[UTUSN]

19. 2nd kick. This needs to be kicked daily forEVAH!!1 n/t

[Uncle Joe]

21. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Lorien.