I've started watching a fair bit of Glenn Beck's program recently; it's entertaining and funny if you don't take it seriously, which is pretty easy. The episodes I've caught are more like Christian Revival Oprah than any traditional political talk show: Beck converses with a small studio audience about their hopes and fears; the audience members have usually acted on said hopes and fears to found organizations that Beck promotes; and those organizations are usually in turn promoting Beck, creating a feedback loop of people who think that "my spouse and I are the ultimate authority."
Relatedly, Sean Wilentz has a piece in The New Yorker tracing the intellectual history of Beck's enterprise. It's not the first one to point out that Beck's brand of reactionary nationalism usually appears on the scene when a liberal government is in power. One interesting note was that one of Beck's icons, Willard Cleon Skousen, a radical anti-communist intellectual, if you can call him that, was reprimanded for his views by the Mormon church.
In 1971, a review in the Mormon journal Dialogue accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary,” and advancing doctrines that came “perilously close” to Nazism. And in 1979, after Skousen called President Jimmy Carter a puppet of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family, the president of the Mormon church issued a national order banning announcements about his organizations.
Beck is, of course, a Mormon, and he often draws on Mormon imagery and ideas in his sermons. I'd be curious what the modern-day Church of Latter Day Saints thinks of Beck's promotion of someone they felt was too right-wing for their church, especially as the LDS tries to shake what remains of its image as a "weird" religion that many evangelicals don't even consider Christian. Maybe LDS leaders see a trade-off in having Beck normalize their religion among the right-wing masses, but the price they're paying is the promotion of a border-line Nazi.
-- Tim Fernholz
