Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (19 page)

Bill O’Reilly asked Beck after the show if this might be called a “revival meeting.”

“It’s a grassroots movement,” Beck explained.

So it turns out he did see himself as a movement leader, after all.

Beck drummed up support for the movement almost nightly on air. “The site was shut down for almost thirty hours because it was getting hit by 500 people 500 times a second … We already have 250,000 people that have joined the ‘
912Project.com
’ … Now, there are more than 400,000 members.” He recommended to followers the slogan “We surround them. We’re not alone. That is the mantra.” He adopted as his own Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon showing a snake divided (instead of the original eight pieces, Beck’s had ten: nine for the nine principles and one piece, the tail, for the twelve values).

“Now is the time to stand up and make your voice heard. Come on—follow me!” Beck said at the start of another 9/12 Project special in May. “Declare yourself a 9/12-er, and come on—follow me!” he said at the start of a show days later. He kept his TV and radio audiences up-to-date about his planned rally in Washington on September 12.

“I gave you the 9/12 Project,” Beck told his followers in August, once again playing Moses. He said he “prayed about” whether to speak at the Washington rally, but decided he would be more useful anchoring coverage of the event from the comfort of the TV studio. “I laid out a plan called the 9/12 Project,” he reminded his audience one night. As an additional incentive to participate, he likened Congress to terrorists and Nazis with a musical video promoting the event. It said: “In the beginning, King George underestimated. Many have underestimated. Hitler underestimated. The world underestimated. Terrorists underestimated the will of the American people! Congress, please don’t underestimate the will of the American people.” Next to a photo of a grinning Beck, the final frame said: “Saturday 9/12, 1–3
P.M
. E.T. Fox News Channel. It’s Time to Stand Up.”

Beck radiated a certain pride of ownership as he anchored Fox’s coverage of the event on the big day. His rallying cry had brought in many of the usual suspects from past demonstrations: those carrying aborted fetus pictures and posters of Obama in whiteface as the Joker from Batman, now coupled with a suggestion to “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy” that played on Ted Kennedy’s death a couple of weeks earlier. There were also plenty of “Thank you, Glenn Beck” and “Glenn Beck for President” signs. From the comfort of his studio, Beck reported with confidence that “this is a collection of people who have never probably marched before.”

Beck brought in his correspondent at the rally. Fox News’s Griff Jenkins ran along a fence and whipped up the crowd on the other side of it.

“You guys got a message for Glenn Beck?” he shouted. The crowd cheered. “Glenn, it’s unbelievable,” Jenkins continued. “Thousands and thousands of people. Look at this crowd right there.” Turning his microphone to the crowd, he asked again, “You got something to say to Glenn Beck?” The crowd cheered again. “Glenn, it’s one mile from the Capitol back to the monument, and that sea of people goes all the way! That’s one mile of people!”

After generating a couple more cheers from the crowd, Jenkins informed the anchor that the crowd had “a lot of salutes” for Beck. “If this is an uprising, we are at the beginning of a political movement,” he reported.

“Wow,” Beck replied.

It was indeed a “wow” moment. Beck’s nascent political movement had motivated tens of thousands of people to march on Washington. But even that impressive reality was not sufficient for Beck. On Monday, he was back behind his microphone, creating fiction. “The
London Telegraph
is now saying the numbers [were] over a million. They quote a source from the National Parks Service saying that is the largest march on Washington ever.”

In fact, the
Telegraph
reported no such thing. “Tens of thousands of conservative ‘tea party’ protesters have staged the biggest demonstration of Barack Obama’s presidency,” the newspaper reported.

On the
Fox & Friends
morning show, Beck declared that “we had a university, I think it’s University of—I don’t remember what university it is, look at the pictures,” he said, and “1.7 million that crowd was estimated at.”

“Wow, because we were saying tens of thousands,” the
Fox & Friends
host observed.

“University looked at it, did the body count,” Beck assured her, never coming up with the name of “university.” (Beck principle #3: “I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.”)

Beck, flush with success, was dropping his earlier insistence that he was not a movement leader. “In many ways, you are sort of the cable news poster child for these tea parties,” Fox’s Greta Van Susteren asked him on air. “Fair description?”

“I guess it’s fair to be able to say that, on the fact that, six months ago, I said that we need to reconnect with our values and our principles, and I laid out the 9/12 Project, the nine values and twelve principles, and that is part of what this has come out of,” Beck answered. “Yes, so I think that’s fair.” (More than fair, in fact. Beck would later say that the Tea Party movement was doing “exactly what I laid out” and that the Republican Party was emulating his nine principles.)

The rally over, Beck turned his 9/12 Project Web site into something of a bulletin board for the Tea Party movement. “4/21: Action Request from the Florida Tea Party … 5/24: 9/12ers Make A Difference in Colorado’s Elections!” And a couple of months after the 9/12 rally, he was ready to announce his followers’ next pilgrimage to Washington. “It’s a multilevel plan,” Beck told O’Reilly. “Now the next phase is coming.”

The next phase would be Beck’s following in Martin Luther King Jr.’s footsteps to the Lincoln Memorial, forty-seven years to the day later. He had a snazzy logo drawn up, showing Honest Abe in his chair and the words “Restoring Honor.” Beck announced that the event would benefit the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a nonprofit that helps the families of wounded or fallen special ops forces. But the small print told a slightly different story: The charity would pay the cost of—and take the financial risk for—Beck’s rally. “All contributions made to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation (SOWF) will first be applied to the costs of the Restoring Honor Rally,” the small print said. “All contributions in excess of these costs will then be retained by the SOWF.”

In preparation for the big event, Beck announced, he would have “a series of conventions” to teach his followers how to organize. He referred to that “100-year plan” developed with “top experts.” And he mentioned in an aside that the rally in Washington would be tied to the release of his new book,
The Plan
. It would, he said, be the “birthday of a new national movement to restore our great country.”

The first part of Beck’s hundred-year plan failed to materialize. Other than gatherings in Orlando and Salt Lake City, his promised conventions didn’t happen. But something better happened. Beck lured a solid lineup of singers and entertainers to perform at the Lincoln Memorial, and he recruited the only person who rivals him in pull with the Tea Party movement—the former governor of Alaska.

“I think it’s going to be the most inspiring—and for me, personally, the most humbling—experience, could be, of my lifetime,” Sarah Palin informed Beck and his listeners on his radio show. “I hope we have a million people there to honor our troops. I’m just so absolutely thrilled that you invited me and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Governor Palin needn’t have worried about the crowd size; regardless of the actual numbers, Beck would find somebody—a foreign news outlet or a “university” somewhere—to say it was more than a million.

More interesting was Palin’s claim that appearing at a Glenn Beck rally could be the most humbling experience of her life. Sarah Palin, humbled in the presence of Beck? That’s not a movement leader—that’s a messiah.

CHAPTER 17
GLENN BECK IS NOT RESPONSIBLE
FOR ANY ACTS OF VIOLENCE
COMMITTED BY HIS VIEWERS;
HE’S JUST AN ENTERTAINER

Early on a Saturday morning, April 4, 2009, Pittsburgh police were called to a domestic disturbance in the city’s Stanton Heights neighborhood on the east side. The routine call would become the deadliest ever for the police department.

Awaiting the police at a ranch house was Richard Poplawski, a troubled twenty-two-year-old man wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with an AK-47, a .22 rifle, and a handgun. Within minutes, three cops were dead: Eric Kelly, the father of three daughters; Stephen Mayhle, the father of two daughters; and Paul Sciulo III, engaged to be married.

Sciulo and Mayhle were both fatally shot in the head when the door opened. Kelly, who was on his way home from his shift and stopped by to help, was shot and killed when he got out of his car.

Poplawski surrendered after a standoff with a SWAT team that lasted nearly four hours. Hundreds of shots were fired.

Soon after this, the Anti-Defamation League reported that the killer had, in the weeks before the shooting, posted a video clip of Beck talking on March 3 about the FEMA camps with Representative Ron Paul of Texas. “FEMA is already very, very powerful and they overrule when they go in on emergencies. So in some ways, they can accomplish what you might be thinking about setting up camps,” Paul told Beck in the interview.

Poplawski had posted a link of the YouTube video to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi Web site. The shooter also posted on the Web site news that Pittsburgh was “ramping up the police state” when it put surveillance cameras on downtown bridges, and he said he had warned grocery customers to stock up on canned goods. These, the Anti-Defamation League said, were part of the conspiracy theories of “the New World Order, planned gun confiscations, and government plots against the citizenry.” These were all Beck themes. Conspiracy theories from the 1990s were revived, including SHTF (shit hits the fan) and TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it)— strong Beck currents.

The shooting came after Beck told his millions of viewers that he “can’t debunk” the notion that FEMA was operating a concentration camp in Wyoming—but before he finally admitted, cagily, that the conspiracy theory wasn’t true.

Is Beck to be blamed for those five girls in Pittsburgh losing their dads? That goes a bit too far; it’s impossible to know what went through the mind of a mentally unstable killer. But the episode does show how Beck’s words are inspiring the fringe, and bringing some of their wacky theories into the mainstream.

Beck has periodically warned his viewers against violence. “Let me be clear on one thing: If someone tries to harm another person in the name of the Constitution or the truth behind 9/11 or anything else, they are just as dangerous and crazy as those people we don’t seem to recognize anymore, you know, the ones who kill in the name of Allah,” he said on his TV show just days before the Pittsburgh killing.

Yet at the same time, his shows are full of violent thoughts and offerings:

“The clock is ticking,” he said one night. “I fear for the future. Somebody is going to do something stupid and it will change the republic overnight,” he added, snapping his fingers. He then went on to discuss President Obama’s “death panels.”

“America, you’re being set up,” he said after the health-care legislation passed. “And it is only a matter of time before an actual crazy person really does something stupid.”

Beck had a guest on his show, outspoken former CIA official Michael Scheuer, to say: “The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States … Only Osama can execute an attack which will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently, and with as much violence as necessary.”

Beck joined in: “Which is why, I was thinking this weekend, if I were him, that would be the last thing I would do right now.”

Beck has proposed poisoning Nancy Pelosi, hitting Charlie Rangel over the head with a shovel, and shooting Michael Moore—all in good fun, of course. He says on air that people in the Obama administration are trying to kill him. And he uses terms of war to describe his fight with the political opposition:

“A lot of people in America are probably feeling a little defeated,” he told Fox viewers as the health-care legislation neared final passage. “But I want you to know: Do not feel that way. The battle was lost, the war is not over. The war is just beginning.”

A few days later, he sent out a message on Twitter in ransom-note style: “Attn: 60’s sanfran radicals—we will rise and crush in Nov. Together like NEVER b4. You WILL fail bcause We R COMING. C it @5 on FNC.”

While Beck disavows violence, he also encourages viewers to read between the lines and infer things that he does not say aloud. Speaking on his radio show in July 2009 of an Obama administration “thugocracy,” he warned:

“Please don’t let this message fall on deaf ears. Please. I fear that there will come a time when I cannot say things that I am currently saying. I fear that it will come to television and to radio, and I will stop saying these things. Understand me clearly. Hear me now: If I ever stop saying these things, you will know why. Because I will have made a choice that I can only say certain things, and I haven’t lost all of the rights. But know that these things are true. And if you hear me stop saying these things, it’s because I can no longer say them to you. But hear them between the sentences. Hear them, please. I will be screaming them to you.”

For those inclined to hear voices, that screaming can be heard quite loudly.

In April 2010, a man by the name of Greg Giusti with a history of mental problems was arrested for threatening Pelosi, the woman Beck had pretended to poison on his set. Giusti had made dozens of calls to Pelosi and, reciting her home address, warned that she should not support health-care legislation if she wanted to see her home again.

In Pelosi’s hometown of San Francisco, KGO-TV reached Giusti’s eighty-three-year-old mother, Eleanor. “Greg has—frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas and that are not consistent with myself or the rest of the family and—which gets him into problems,” she told the station. “And apparently I would say this must be another one that somehow he’s gotten onto either by—I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he—that’s where he comes from.”

Fox News: And it’s a safe bet she wasn’t talking about
Special Report with Bret Baier
, or
Your World with Neil Cavuto
.

A crazy person watching Beck could have thought he was doing the world a favor by taking on this violent Nancy Pelosi. Beck listed Pelosi as one of the “really dangerous people” in California, including communists, socialists, and ecoterrorists. He accused her of “inciting” conservative demonstrators and “slapping them across the face.”

A couple of weeks before Giusti’s arrest, Beck beckoned to photos of people including Obama and Pelosi and called them “dangerous.” He asked: “You’d pick up a gun? Have you ever thought of that? These people have. Because possibly, maybe the question should be asked, maybe they’re tired of evolution, and maybe they are waiting for revolution.”

On the same show, Beck ventured: “I’d never thought about revolution. I’ve never thought about armed insurrection or bombing or anything like that. Then I looked at the other side of the board and I realized—wow, the people around the president have. Not only have they thought about it, many of them have plotted it. Some of them were actually engaged in bomb throwing.”

The previous night, Beck had delivered his plea to “those of you in the administration who are coming after me” to remember the commandment “Thou shall not kill.”

During this same period of post-health-reform attacks, Beck said that Obama had “just punched you in the face with health care” and asserted that “most of the country feel like they’ve been spanked over health care.”

So if the Democrats are trying to hurt or kill Beck and his followers, can the Democrats be hurt or killed in self-defense? Disturbed minds would have to wonder. “You can try to put the lid on this group of people, but you will never silence us,” Beck said on his radio show. “You will never—you can shoot me in the head, you can shoot the next guy in the head, but there will be ten others that line up.”

In June 2010, Beck returned to his “shoot me” dare. “Shoot me in the head before I stop talking about the Founders. Shoot me in the head if you try to change our government.” And Beck evidently doesn’t think such an act is far-fetched. “You have to be prepared to take rocks to the head,” he advised his radio audience in May 2010. “The other side is attacking.”

Violent talk is not new to Beck, but people probably didn’t take it very seriously in the early years. “I’ve been coming up with a list of people that I want to kill with a shovel,” he proposed on the radio in 2001, specifically suggesting that “we start” with Rangel, the New York Democratic congressman.

“I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” he said in 2005, the same year he admitted to “hating the 9/11 victims’ families” because of their complaints. “No, I think I could” kill Moore, he continued. “I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out—is this wrong?”

As in other areas, Beck’s move to Fox brought the violent talk to a new level. As the town-hall meetings over health care heated up in the summer of 2009, he helped calm the situation by declaring that a coup was taking the country into dictatorship: “There is a coup going on. There is a stealing of America. And the way it is done, it is being done through the guise of an election but they lie to us the entire time … And they’re going to say they did it democratically and they’re going to grab power every way they can, and God help us in an emergency.”

The imagery grew more and more colorful: Beck, as previously mentioned, pretending to pour gasoline on a guest and asking, “President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?”; Beck proposing to “run those who are bankrupting our country and literally stealing our children’s future out of town. Grab a torch!”; Beck calling his opponents “bloodsucker vampires” and concluding that “either the economy becomes like a walking dead or you drive a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers.”

More than once, he has invoked secession as a solution to conservatives’ objections—suggesting the fanciful notion of a civil war over health-care reform. “Texas is going to be surrounded. You need a giant moat of fire,” he said one day. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Civil war? Great! Tell us more.

“If push comes to shove,” he continued; “if nullification [of health care and other laws] does not stand, if I can’t nullify the things that you’re doing to us, then we secede because Texans are serious about secession.” Beck likes this idea so much that he has spoken of moving from his Connecticut mansion to Texas. “You’re going to have the feds coming, you’re going to have a flood going from America into Texas.”

Another time, Beck told listeners that “you can’t convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn’t allow you to secede. The Constitution is not a suicide pact and if a state says I don’t want to go there because that’s suicide, they have a right to back out. People have a right not to commit economic suicide … I sign into this union and I can never ever get out? No matter what the government does, I can never get out? That only leaves you with one other option. That doesn’t seem like a good option.”

Except for the moat of fire.

There are less provocative ways for Beck to make his point, but that wouldn’t bring in three million viewers a night and eight million radio listeners a week. He doesn’t merely voice disagreement with progressives, he says, “I’m going to be like the Israeli Nazi hunters … To the day I die I am going to be a progressive hunter. I am going to find the people who did this to our country and expose them, I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes.”

Beck doesn’t merely voice his displeasure with health-care reform. He says: “We need to fight hard within the rules and pray, get down on your knees and pray, pray. It is September 11th all over again except we didn’t have the collapsing buildings, but we need God more than ever.”

He doesn’t raise objections to Democrats’ legislative tactics. He makes a gun with his hand and says: “They are putting a gun to America’s head. Pass this or we all die! Yes, they’re doing that.”

He doesn’t state his differences with Obama’s advisers Cass Sunstein and John Holdren. He says: “Between health-care and the environment those two men, in the wrong conditions, will be responsible for many, many deaths.”

He doesn’t raise worries about where liberal policies are taking the country. He says: “They are taking you to a place to be slaughtered.”

Hunters. Slaughter. Death. Die. Gun to the head. What are people to do with these violent images? Beck has an idea: Ambush lawmakers with them—at their homes.