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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3 PART ARTICLE:
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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/The making of Glenn Beck
His roots, from the alleged suicide of his mom to Top 40 radio to the birth of the morning zoo. Part 1 of 3
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index.htmlGlenn Beck becomes damaged goods
The radio phenom takes over the morning zoo,
makes fun of miscarriages and flames out. Part 2 of 3
.... Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of
vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show ... Curtis,
whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. ....
...He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were
exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was
over-the-top childish from Day One,
a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being
disruptive and vengeful." ....
Louisville is where Beck began experimenting with another streak that would become more pronounced in later years:
militaristic patriotism and calls for the bombing of Muslims.
The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- ....
"A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a
miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce (Kelly) apparently can't do anything right -- about
he can't even have a baby." ....
"It was
low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "
There are certain places you just don't go."
"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became
just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
The stunt was a textbook case of
media marketing 101: Attention is good; controversy is better. Outrage is the gift that keeps on giving. ....
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/23/glenn_beck_three/Glenn Beck rises again
Getting clean, getting Mormon, getting talk radio -- and going to Yale, with the help of Joe Lieberman. Part 3 of 3
....
Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just
humiliate them in public. He was a
sadist, the kind of guy who
rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague. ....
One local politician who appreciated Beck's regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe
Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the '90s, until they fell out over Lieberman's refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck's search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn't last long at Yale. He took one class, "Early Christology," and dropped out. ....
"The guy had
dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I'm like, '
But you fucking hated him!' "
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