Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One
Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.htmlMeet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life
Cleon Skousen was
a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered himBy Alexander Zaitchik
.... But more interesting than the contents of
"The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar
Hoover's FBI, which
maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some
2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."
As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the
Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....
...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....
...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a
new and improved conspiracy that
merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....
"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." ....
Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon
found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded
Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of
privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and
aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....
...
"The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....
"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the
National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project,
claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."
Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a
profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.
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