My friend Myers and I had finished covering the
9/12 March On DC and were walking north along First Street
when we passed an older woman and a teenage girl who had attended
the massive rally at the Capitol. They were wearing identical
“American Patriot” T-shirts and so, when we found ourselves
stopped at an intersection, waiting for the light to change, I
began a brief interview by asking the older woman, “Is this your
daughter?”
Of course, the girl was her granddaughter, and my intentional
flattery won me a new friend, who was quite eager to discuss her
involvement in the big rally, a highlight of the Tea Party
movement to which she proudly belonged. After a few minutes, the
woman began to elaborate on the biographical details of a
particular Obama administration official.
The fluency with which she discussed regulatory “czar” Cass
Sunstein prompted me to ask, “Are you a Beck fan?” But it wasn’t
the older woman who answered.
“Oh, yeah!” the teenager volunteered enthusiastically, a
sentiment heartily endorsed by her grandma — and also by a large
swath of the huge crowd who turned out for the rally. At one
point, while a CNN reporter was doing a live interview at the
Sept. 12 event, the crowd behind her began to
chant “Glenn Beck! Glenn
Beck!”
Grassroots conservative enthusiasm notwithstanding, the
talk-radio host and Fox News personality is under attack this
week, with the liberal establishment’s favorite weapon, a
Time
magazine cover: “Mad Man:
Glenn Beck and the angry style of American politics.” This
continues a long tradition of weekly newsmagazine covers
demonizing conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Newt
Gingrich.
Time writer
David Von Drehle begins his attack thus: “On Sept. 12,
a large crowd gathered in Washington to protest … what?… If you
get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered
about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your
information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of
thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was
peaceful and patriotic.”
So you see that Drehle can go either way here:
He can use the crowd to discredit Beck, or use Beck to discredit
the crowd. Either way, the point is to prepare the reader of
Time magazine (who clearly does not get
information from conservative sources) to be fearful of both Beck
and the crowd at the Capitol, whatever their numbers might have
been.
After a few more paragraphs, Von Drehle plays his
trump card: “The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter
famously called ‘the paranoid style’ — the sense that Masons or
the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in
league to destroy the country — is aflame again…”
Von Drehle’s invocation of “the paranoid style,” a trope that
Hofstadter derived from Theodor Adorno’s “authoritarian
personality,” is intended to clearly signal the reader that Beck
is a kook, a conspiracy theorist, a demagogue pandering to the
dangerous emotions of the ignorant mob.
You know. Nudge, nudge. Like Barry
Goldwater.
That this is a very familiar sort of smear tactic does not
prevent Von Drehle’s clever work from alarming Peter Wehner, a
former Bush administration official who bluntly pronounced Beck
“Harmful
for the Conservative Movement” and proceeded to declare:
“Beck seems to be a roiling mix of fear, resentment,
and anger — the antithesis of Ronald Reagan.”
That Reagan was himself smeared by the journalistic predecessors
of Von Drehle is evidently beyond Wehner’s scope of knowledge. If
Americans had gotten their opinions of Reagan from liberal
writers, the Gipper never would have been president and the
victims of Soviet tyranny would still fill the gulags.
Having never met Beck, I am not qualified to speak of
whether he is representative of the “paranoid style.” However, my
friend and fellow American Spectator
contributor Matthew Vadum
has been a studio guest on Beck’s Fox News program and did not
mention any “roiling mix of fear, resentment, and anger.” If Beck
rants off-camera about black helicopters and Masons, it eluded
Vadum’s notice.
While my acquaintance with Beck is limited to occasionally
catching a few moments of his TV or radio shows, I did have the
opportunity to speak to many of the people at the Sept. 12
Capitol rally. My Arizona blogger friend
Barbara Espinosa was there, and I spent many hours before,
during and after the event talking to the organizers, attendees
and speakers, including Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) and author
Mason Weaver.
None of these people seemed to think that Glenn Beck represented
a menace to public safety or the conservative movement. Given the
evident threat that Von Drehle and Wehner perceive, why this
remarkable silence from so many?
They’re all in on it together — the grandmother and
teenagers, Pence and Vadum and Weaver! It’s all a clandestine
conspiracy to conceal the hidden agenda for
global domination by the Secret Legion of Beck!
And if you don’t believe it, then you’re obviously a
paranoid kook.
