Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (12 page)

The acquisition of Van Jones’s scalp filled Beck with bloodlust. He was convinced the entire Obama administration was chock-full of Marxists, Maoists, and communists of every stripe. All that he was lacking was evidence.

He set his “watch dogs”—his followers who search the Internet for clues to fill out Beck’s theories—to work on more administration targets. “Van Jones was the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in one message on Twitter. “Watch Dogs: FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER,” he Tweeted. “Do not link before burning to disc.” The names were those of three other Obama advisers on Beck’s long hit list.

“This wasn’t about Van Jones,” he told his viewers after Jones had been forced out. “This is to try to figure out who the president of the United States is, by looking at the people he surrounded himself with.” And the people he surrounded himself with, curiously, all seem to hate America.

Beck moved himself to tears as he spoke of the various and sundry Obama communists. “What I am telling you now is that there are Marxist revolutionaries who have dedicated themselves to principles that will destroy our nation as we know it!” he shouted. After his tears subsided, he went on: “I’m asking you to consider things that sound insane. But they’re true.”

Variations of that cry would go out every few days. “They are exposing themselves as the radical, revolutionary country-destroyers that they are,” he said months later. “Because only one is going to be standing in the end—our country, or the progressives.”

This was, of course, the very lowest form of political argument: describing your political opponents not just as opponents but as enemies of the nation. It’s impossible to have a rational debate with a traitor who seeks to destroy the country. But, then again, rational debate wasn’t exactly what Beck was going for.

Beck’s first choice of an Obama administration target, even before Jones, had been a physicist by the name of John Holdren, who had taken a leave from Harvard’s Kennedy School to become director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Holdren first came to Beck’s attention after the Web site World Net Daily and other parts of the conservative blogosphere began to report that Holdren, more than three decades earlier, had written some very strange things. In a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Beck took the whispers from the dark corners of the Internet and splashed them in the mass media.

“The science czar,” Beck told his viewers one night in July 2009, “once wrote with very little disapproval about using forced sterilization for population control.”

“Just absolutely beyond the pale,” said Beck’s guest, from the conservative
National Review
. “As far as we know, he has never renounced.”

“No, never,” Beck concurred. He then read from Holdren’s book: “The government might require only implantation of a contraceptive capsule to sterilize people,” Beck read. “It must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children and old people, and also pets or livestock.”

Added Beck: “So, he doesn’t mind making men sterile, as long as, you know, Fluffy isn’t hurt.”

“Sterilizing agents from drinking water,” the guest contributed. “I mean, it’s nuts.” He added that “the man has signed his name to all of this.”

A week later, Beck was after Holdren again. “We got czars coming out our—they’re shooting out of our butts,” he said. “Czars like John Holdren who is—there is great evil happening in our country. Holdren has proposed forced abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

Proposing forced abortions and sterilizing agents in the drinking water? That
would
be evil—if it were true. But it wasn’t.

Holdren did indeed coauthor a book in 1977 titled
Ecoscience
, a college textbook. And the book does indeed discuss “involuntary fertility control.” But the authors didn’t exactly endorse it. The book says that “some countries may ultimately have to resort to [such actions] unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means.” It contained the part that Beck quoted, but it also said that “the risk of serious unforeseen side effects would, in our opinion, militate against the use of any such agent [as sterilants].” The authors said “a far better choice” would be to use “milder methods.”

As for “forced abortions,” they argued that, in a legal sense, “compulsory abortion could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society,” but “few today consider the situation in the United States serious enough to justify compulsion.”

No proposal for forced abortion here—just a textbook legal analysis (albeit a dubious one) of this and every other possible population-control option.

But what Beck lacked in actual facts, he made up for with repetition—each time taking Holdren’s argument further beyond what the textbook said. One night it was this: “He said that nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence can you find the right to have any number of children.” Two weeks later it was this: “He believes that we should have planetary control, you know, through the U.N.” Several weeks later it was: “He also said maybe forced abortions would be good—you know, the kind they have in China. Has he ever denounced these methods? No, no.”

* * *

However hard Beck swung at Holdren, he just couldn’t dislodge him from his White House job. The charges wouldn’t stick, and so, except for the occasional mention of Holdren, Beck moved on.

He had only modestly more success with the next name on his hit list: Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, who, like Van Jones and Holdren, came to Beck’s attention after first becoming the subject of attacks on the far-right Web site World Net Daily.

Sunstein had been nominated to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (Beck called the position the “regulatory czar,” though it was a Senate-confirmed position that existed long before the Obama presidency).

Sunstein’s appointment was, if anything, a nod to conservatives on Obama’s part. Sunstein had backed John Roberts to be chief justice of the Supreme Court and supported the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, voiding Washington, D.C.’s handgun ban.

But Beck had a different view. He determined that Sunstein was unfit to hold office because of his views on … pets? “Wait until you meet this guy,” Beck said on his Fox show. He “believes in giving legal rights to livestock, wildlife, and pets. So, your pet can have an attorney file a lawsuit against you. When my pet starts to talk, he can call an attorney. Human rights for livestock? This is not the America I grew up in or you grew up in.”

As Sunstein’s confirmation vote in the Senate approached, Beck stepped up his attack. August 25, 2009: “Cass Sunstein … has also proposed that your dog be allowed to have an attorney in court.” September 2: “He wanted your pet to have an attorney … If they could find out if rats suffer, and you’re trying to trap rats or kick them out of your house, a rat could sue you.”

This was, evidently, based on the introduction Sunstein and a coauthor wrote for a 2004 book on animal rights that they edited. In it, Sunstein and his coauthor actually argued something close to the opposite of what Beck charged: that states could enforce animal cruelty laws without declaring that animals could no longer be considered property.

“A state could dramatically increase enforcement of existing bans on cruelty and neglect without turning animals into persons, or making them into something other than property,” they wrote. “A state could do a great deal to prevent animal suffering, indeed carry out the central goals of the animal welfare program, without saying that animals cannot be owned. We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are persons, or that they are not property. A state could certainly confer rights on a pristine area, or a painting, and allow people to bring suit on its behalf, without therefore saying that that area and that painting may not be owned.”

Conservative writer David Frum judged Beck’s interpretation of Cass’s work to be “beyond sloppy, beyond ignorant, proceeding straight toward the deceptive.”

But effective. Two Republican senators put “holds” on the nomination, blocking it from being considered by the Senate. Finally, Senate Democrats held a vote on September 9 to try to break the Republican filibuster—and Beck came on air just as the vote was approaching.

“It is supposed to happen—surprise, surprise, no coincidence in politics—in this hour,” Beck said. “You can still call Washington and tell them ‘no.’ ”

He repeated his grievances. Sunstein is, Beck said, “a man who doesn’t believe we should be eating meat … a man who believes that animals should be provided attorneys in the courts of law, a man who believes that everyone must be an organ donor, a man that believes that you should not be able to remove rats from your home if it causes them any pain.

“This is the lunatic fringe!” said Beck, who speaks with some authority on the subject.

But, as with Holdren, the charges didn’t stick. The filibuster was broken, and the next day Sunstein was confirmed, 57–40. There have been, as of this writing, no attempts to ban hunting or meat eating or to give dogs or rats legal standing.

Beck could do nothing more than add Sunstein to his list of Obama officials planning a progressive/communist/socialist/fascist takeover of the country. His monologues became seasoned with phrases such as “Are you crazy, Cass?” and “Extreme radical Cass Sunstein” and “the most dangerous man in America.”

* * *

But in Beck’s mind there were many people vying for the title of most dangerous man or woman—and as luck would have it, they all worked for Barack Obama.

Carol Browner, a former Clinton administration official hired by Obama to advise him on climate issues, was a socialist, Beck determined. “Hard core,” confirmed his guest, from
The National Review
.

This allegation stemmed from Browner’s affiliation with the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which was indeed organized by the Socialist International. But it includes such nonsocialists as former British prime ministers Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.

That was enough for Beck. “She was part of Socialists International. This is a group for global governance,” he reported. “Socialist” became part of her title, as in “socialist energy czar.” Every few weeks, Beck would remind viewers of her as he built the Obama socialist conspiracy on his chalkboard. “Carol Browner—she’s a socialist,” he would say, or “Carol Browner—you remember her. She’s that socialist.”

Beck’s “watch dogs,” meanwhile—those he reached on Twitter with a request to “find everything you can” on Browner, Sunstein, and Mark Lloyd—were beginning to come through for him. One sent him a video of Lloyd, “chief diversity officer,” at the Federal Communications Commission, discussing Hugo Chávez’s revolution in Venezuela. Lloyd described it as “really an incredible revolution.” From this Beck deduced that the FCC lawyer “is a huge fan of the socialist/Marxist revolution in Venezuela.”

Another Marxist! “I’m just on the beginning of my research of Mark Lloyd—but he strikes me as a Marxist,” Beck proposed one night. Further, he concluded that Lloyd was “the man trying to silence free speech in America” and was “positively un-American.”

“Have we found another Van Jones?” Beck teased his viewers one night. “I tell you the answer to that one is: No. We found someone, I believe, worse.”

Beck’s Kremlinology was starting to get complicated. There was a Marxist green-jobs adviser, a Marxist FCC official, a socialist energy adviser, an abortionist science adviser, and a regulatory adviser who wanted your dog to sue you. Enter Ron Bloom, whose Marxist/socialist credentials include a degree from Harvard Business School and work as an investment banker before he became an adviser to unions.

Soon after Obama named Bloom as an adviser on manufacturing policy, Beck started playing a clip of Bloom speaking: “We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who’ll pay you a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it is an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend, you should get a dog.”

With that cynical take on the system, Bloom joined “the radicals the president has placed around himself,” according to Beck. “Why,” he asked another night, “do you think there are so many Maoists hanging around the White House?”

An excellent question. One explanation was that Obama was, as Beck alleged, a communist who stealthily stocked his administration with secret admirers of Red China. The other possibility was that Beck, with his Internet-combing “watchdogs,” was turning any stray remark by any of the ten thousand political appointees in the Obama administration into a communist manifesto.

This second possibility gained some weight when Beck turned his sights on Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who had used that perch to criticize Fox News. Dunn was not your typical communist: She advised corporations, worked for former Senate leader Tom Daschle, and helped to run basketball great Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign. But Beck saw her as a Maoist. His evidence: a high school graduation speech she gave.

“The third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse-tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you’re going to make choices,” Dunn told the kids. She recalled Mao in 1947 saying, “You fight your war and I’ll fight mine.” And she recalled Mother Teresa saying, “Go find your own Calcutta.”

It’s not terribly uncommon for an American to quote Mao; John McCain has often observed that “in the words of Chairman Mao, it’s always darkest before it’s totally black.” But Beck pounced, particularly on the “favorite political philosophers” bit. Dunn insisted she was joking—a reasonable proposition because neither the dictator nor the humanitarian quite qualifies as a philosopher—but Beck was convinced he had found another communist.