Thread: Is Beck Using Bigger Audience to 'Promote Birchers'?

WAR ROOM
By Alex Koppelman
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 13:15 EDT

What's Beck doing with his bigger audience? Promoting Birchers

As I noted Monday, Fox News host Glenn Beck has seen his ratings soaring recently, as he's climbing close to the top of the cable news charts. And his special on Friday was particularly successful, scoring the highest ratings among the key 25-to-54 demographic of any program in the genre so far this month.

What Beck gave these new viewers, though, was a blast from the radical past, and more specifically, the John Birch Society's radical past.

At New Majority.com, David Frum writes, "The audience for Beck’s Friday night special were each given copies of two books. One of them was Cleon Skousen’s 'Five Thousand Year Leap.' Skousen, who died in 2006, is one of the legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government under the control of David Rockefeller." (Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

What Frum missed, though, was that the other book Beck promoted, "The Real George Washington," has its own Skousen connection. It was published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which Skousen founded.

In a 2007 article, the National Review's Mark Hemingway excoriated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for his familiarity with Skousen, noting that when Skousen's conspiracy theories took an even darker turn than normal in the 1970s, the Mormon Church -- which had previously embraced him -- officially distanced itself from the NCCS' predecessor, another Skousen organization known as the Freemen Institute.

"Skousen accused the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefellers of puppeteering the election of Jimmy Carter to pave the way for One World Government, his new favorite topic," Hemingway wrote in describing the new ideology that made the Mormon Church renounce Skousen's group. Elsewhere in the article, he described Skousen as an "all-around nutjob," and said his book "The Naked Communist" was "so irrational in its paranoia that it would have made Whittaker Chambers blush."

"According to Skousen, 'The Manchurian Candidate' was a documentary — he earnestly believed Communists sought to create a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters,' Hemingway says. "Skousen was active with the John Birch Society throughout the 1960s, even going so far as to write another book titled 'The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,' accusing those that criticized Birchers as promoting Communism... Skousen even managed to record this gem -- a spoken word album about the dangers of LSD for the John Birch Society’s record label."

Update: I almost forgot about a post I wrote way back in July of 2007, when Beck was still on CNN Headline News but was already flirting with the JBS. At the time, he brought the group's spokesman, Sam Antonio, on his show, and told Antonio, "[W]hen I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts. However, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me."

― Alex Koppelman

http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/ ... ce=refresh

God Bless Glenn Beck, he has more integrity in his little finger than all the liberal media broadcasters put together.

The Communist in Washington might be kept in check by the Birch Society, which would be a good thing for our country.

They used to laugh about the minority of people that thought the world was round, and so, it maybe that the Birchers have a lot more knowledge than majority would have us believe.

Koppelman has obviously not read the minutes of various CFR meetings.

He is obviously not noting the trend of the UN and EU initiatives (Let's ALL sign the KYOTO Treaty; let's have one world currency; let's have a flat world with no borders so workers can migrate whither they may; let's do away with the concept of the nation state...it has outlived its usefulness; let's do away with the notion of national sovereignty).

He obviously has not read the details of the SPP agreements, nor the basic principles of NAFTA and CAFTA, and how they undermine US sovereignty, not to mention food and product safety standards/

What Koppelman can't stand (or perhaps understand) is that Beck is resonating with the frustration, concerns and fears that many of us have regarding the direction our government has been heading. That is why his ratings are up. And Beck does not pull punches or mince words. You don't like it, fine. You don't agree, fine. But there is no mistaking where he is coming from.

It is also noteworthy that Fox News ratings in general are up, which includes O'Reilly and Hannity. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh said the other day the latest Arbitron ratings for his radio show were up by around 30 or 32 %. That puts Rush's audience at around 26 million or so. I did not realize the John Birch society was so large. But Rush is saying pretty much the same stuff as Beck. Different style....same perspective.