Three part article on Glenn Beck at Salon... excerpts, one about becoming damaged goods in 1986

[madfloridian]

and getting fired.

First a little background from Part 1, then on to the part about in 1986.

From Part 1:

But the Becks were never a part of the valley's counterculture. The family was best known among the town's population of 15,000 for William Beck's family bakery, the Sweet Tooth, which was located in the heart of downtown. The Becks were also active in the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, whose day school Beck and his sisters attended. To this day, the face-to-face community of Mount Vernon and the watercolor backdrop of Skagit Valley remains the soft-focus template for Beck's evocations of idealized small-town "real" America. He has also pointed to the area's white demographic -- made up of descendants of Swedish, German and Dutch settlers -- as the source of his lingering discomfort around Jews and other ethnic minorities. "I'm the whitest guy you will ever meet," Beck never tires of saying. "The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring."

This is from Part 2.

Glenn Beck becomes damaged goods

Louisville is where Beck began experimenting with another streak that would become more pronounced in later years: militaristic patriotism and calls for the bombing of Muslims.
The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- but even then his politics were anything but tie-dyed. After opening the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Beck played patriotic music through the morning. The only track receiving multiple plays was a New Wave-ish spoof titled "Qaddafi Sucks." The song was a huge hit with listeners, dozens of whom called Beck to tell him how inspired they were by his patriotism. Caller after caller applauded him for "standing up for America." When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. "I personally don't think we did enough," he says. "We should've went over there (sic) and bombed the hell out of 'em."

What's most notable about this early version of Glenn Beck as Super Patriot is his near listlessness. There are none of the fire-breathing, teary-eyed histrionics that would come to define Beck's future radio and TV persona. Even while offering up star-spangled red meat, Beck sounds as if he would rather be smacking Liz Curtis around. When a young male caller suggests kidnapping Libyan agents and then torturing them by sliding them down razor blades into waiting pools of alcohol, Beck simply replies, "Thanks for the call. Buh-bye."

Whether Beck was tired or stoned that day, he was almost certainly depressed. Despite his creative freedom, local star status and high salary, Beck's mental state was on a slide. By his own telling, he was drinking heavily, snorting coke and entertaining thoughts of suicide. "There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it," Beck later wrote. "Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I'm only alive today because (a) I'm too cowardly to kill myself ... and (b) I'm too stupid."

Beck left Louisville at the end of 1986 a defeated man. His signature mix of Gadhafi songs, fat jokes and racial impersonations had made waves, but failed to produce numbers. With Beck at the helm during morning drive, WRKA slipped to third in the market. He was fired and the station brought its youth experiment to an end. As Beck and his wife packed their bags for Phoenix in early 1987, WRKA switched to an oldies format.

Scary stuff indeed.

The following is from Part 3 and took place in New Haven, CT during his time at Clear Channel there.

During his first two years in Connecticut, Beck slid further toward the abyss.

He was drinking and mixing recreational and prescription drugs. Once again, he earned a rep among his coworkers for being erratic and moody. "When Beck was not taking certain drugs he was supposed to be taking he could act very bizarre," remembers Kelly Nash, who managed Beck in New Haven.

"He didn't want anyone questioning his authority. I remember he fired our consultant and brought in his old friend Jim Sumpter. The two of them created and launched an in-house research project that made absolutely no sense. When I confronted him on the absurdity of his approach, he said, 'This is above your head.' Then he locked the door to his office. I thought, 'This guy is out of control. He's insane.'"

By 1994, Beck was suicidal. He imagined putting a gun inside his mouth and squeezing the trigger to the music of his fellow Washingtonian, Kurt Cobain, recently killed by his own hand. Everywhere Beck turned, things were falling apart. His marriage was failing. Pat Gray, his best friend and creative partner, was sick of Beck's drama, and about to move his family to Salt Lake City. (He would later describe the station under Beck as "a pretty cancerous place to be.") Beck saw his daughters only through a pot haze and in-between blackouts. Twisting the multiple knives in Beck's gut was the regular humiliation of Top 40 promotional stunts. In a typical KC101 event, Beck dressed up as a banana and dove into a pool full of Styrofoam.

We can thank WFLA radio in Tampa for Beck's resurgence. I can tell you Beck became wildly popular in that area very quickly.

Beck was torn over the possibility of leaving his young daughters back in Connecticut with his ex-wife Claire, but the chance was too good to pass up. Beck flew down. When the 35-year-old returned from sunny Tampa to a snowy New Haven, he was holding a two-year contract to host an afternoon talk show on WFLA.

"To switch formats like Beck did, and take it immediately to a top 20 market like Tampa, is almost unheard of," notes Kelly Nash, Beck's last boss in FM radio. Not for the last time in talk radio, Beck beat the odds. At 3 p.m. on January 3, 2000, "The Glenn Beck Program" debuted in Tampa Bay.

I remember well the pro-war rallies Beck and Jeb Bush held together which got huge publicity on WFLA TV, while anti-war rallies were ignored.

The rest is playing out before us now.

[BlooInBloo]

1. What this "waiting pools" business? Does he mean "wading pools"?

[madfloridian]

3. It appears to mean pools that were "waiting" to be used.

I noticed that also.

[BlooInBloo]

4. Oooohh - I gotcha! lol! Thanks!

[47of74]

2. Holy S--t

[madfloridian]

6. Strange background for one who is a hero to so many.

.

[Quantess]

5. Most of these sordid details make me despise him less.

Getting fired, (supposedly) recovering from alcohol and substance abuse problems, being depressed to the point of being suicidal, "being torn" over the possibility of splitting his family, all sound like difficult challenges that many of us have faced, and can empathize with. Good hearted people grow in positive ways from these challenging difficulties, and, though scarred, they tend to become better people with bigger hearts from their experiences.

But, we know he has convoluted thought patterns, including his naive pretensions of his European background: Beck...has also pointed to the area's white demographic -- made up of descendants of Swedish, German and Dutch settlers...
He clearly has a skewed vision of modern Europe, and probably has not spent much quality time there. He would quickly discover that most Europeans would realize he's a racist ass, and kick him out of the Biergarten.

Glenn Beck is probably a sociopath, if, after all the hard knocks he has faced, isn't a nicer person. And we all can see he's the biggest asshole on television.

[madfloridian]

7. I don't despise so much as I fear the power he has over so many.

He attracts many who are not that stable themselves. It builds hate and anger.

[Quantess]

8. Not every so-called mentally unstable person is filled with hate and anger.

People with depression, people overcoming substance and alcohol abuse, people with suicide in their family background, people who have whatever problems that Glenn Beck has supposedly faced: So many of us have faced or are now facing these problems.

I think it's judgmental to say that people who have gone through these challenges are somehow weaker to his ploys. I'm going to just come out and say, that I have dealt with some of the same difficulties this asshole has supposedly been through, yet I'm a nicer, kinder, more aware person as a result.

It builds hate and anger.
No. Glenn Beck, HIMSELF, builds hate and anger.

[corpseratemedia]

9. That is a good point.

And what supports it is when people around him are saying the work environment he created was "cancerous." Now he's off drugs, and found the Mormon lord, and yet his persona and the environment it creates (on a mass scale) is still cancerous. It's HIM. And people like that can't learn from hardship.

I do feel sorry for his children.

[madfloridian]

12. I think you misunderstood my fear.

Of course it is Beck himself building the anger. I thought that is what I was saying.

I guess I was not careful in phrasing, as I have a history at DU for not being judgmental. I judge politicians and radio hosts who are irresponsible.

I was thinking that since we have seen the people at the tea parties and the 9/12 events and the way they act, that my statement would be understood in the way I meant it.

There are people at those events who don't know why they are there, but they are somehow attracted to something Beck does or says. He has a great power over people who don't even know why they are so angry, and just might shoot someone or attack them. They really do act crazy. He plays on their fears on his shows. Fears of who knows what.

That being said, I don't have any sympathy or empathy for Glenn Beck because of his past. I would perhaps if he were not leading hate-filled groups into anger over they know not what.

He is a dangerous man.

[47of74]

18. Ordinarily I would have some empathy

But not for Beck.

[madfloridian]

19. So would I ordinarily.

But I agree, not for him. Not when he is pushing a dangerous agenda.

[Quantess]

22. I'm familiar with some of your posting history, and I can tell that you are not judgmental.

:) You haven't hurt my feelings, or anything like that (I'm not channeling Glenn Beck's tears, LOL.) I do think it's a thought provoking article, but I don't think it's a perfect analysis of him.

But, maybe because he taps into his emotional core, which is naturally wounded for personal reasons, his followers actually believe that this man has been wounded by the things he bemoans: Obama, liberals, etc. Everyone in his audience has experienced some frustration or hurt, and so when Beck channels his anger and hurt onto something, they think that that's what caused their own problems, too.

I think the followers who are most inspired by his emotional outbursts are the ones who are NOT in touch with their feelings. They probably have no idea why they are angry and unhappy, and they believe Beck's emotional appeal.

So, I would say that people who have good awareness of their psychological turmoil, who are able to talk about feelings, past traumas, and have self awareness, are going to be more immune to Beck's emotional appeal, no matter how many hardships they have endured. People who close off their past hurts, and have low emotional awareness, are probably more vulnerable.

[eridani]

10. KIng County Dems to lead anti-Glen Beck demo in Seattle

The King County Democrats
will lead a coalition of organizations in a rally
against Fox News and Beck's lies and distortions

NO KEYS TO THE CITY AWARDED HERE !!

Saturday September 26, 2009

PROTEST

11:30 am-12:30 pm

West side of street across from Safeco Field in Seattle
(1250 1st Avenue)

Rosemary Blackwell-KCDCC Team Captain
( signs and buttons will be available )

Call 425.255.2679 for more details

[madfloridian]

13. That's good to see them fighting.

Thanks for posting that, hope there is a huge crowd.

[BumRushDaShow]

11. Why is he still on the air

while he and people like him including Savage Weiner and Mark Levin, literally have nervous breakdowns on-air. That is how low these syndicators have stooped for ratings.

[madfloridian]

14. Ratings.

.

[Canuckistanian]

15. I thought he'd only RECENTLY gone crazy

I'd heard of the radio show earlier back in the Bush days, but I didn't realize he had been insane since the friggin' 80s.

[Qutzupalotl]

16. 9/12=Remember the good old days, when we'd just been attacked?

When it was okay to want to bomb all the Muslims? Good times.
:sarcasm:

[madfloridian]

17. I remember. According to some right wing radio guys....it is still ok.

I remember all the flags on the cars here, 4 or 5 on a car. I remember the chants of USA USA everywhere around here. The churches preaching holy war. Reminded me of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here.

[madfloridian]

20. Interesting paragraph about Lieberman and Beck.

From Part 3:

"One local politician who appreciated Beck's regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the '90s, until they fell out over Lieberman's refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck's search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn't last long at Yale. He took one class, "Early Christology," and dropped out."

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/23/glenn_beck_three/index1.html

[voc]

21. He serves his masters well.

Beck,clearly having a host of issues,has parleyed them into a winning,if suspect,combination for those who live on hate.
His tears are either a harbinger of his inevitable mental decline or an unrecognized brilliance that only the Emmy Award would justify.

[madfloridian]

23. Good point...

a winning combination for "those who live on hate."

[madfloridian]

24. Part 3 page 1....the early 1990s

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/23/glenn_beck_three/index.html

"Beck was known at B104 as a pro's pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. "Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street," remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. "At first we thought he was going to get lunch." The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck's arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car's gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was "completely out of it" when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, "Real America," Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck's coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. "He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was 'under wet blankets,'" remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague."

[Doctor_J]

25. I'd like to know why he's never denied raping and murdering a girl

a few year back.

then I want to know why Big Media keeps doing puff pieces on one of the country's foremost domestic terrorist.

[Taverner]

26. What bothered me about that article is that I almost started feeling...sympathy for the devil

Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and bad taste
Been around just twenty years
Lied to many a man and spread my hate

Dammit! The last thing I want to do is feel any sympathy for that fuckwad!

[madfloridian]

27. If you start feeling too sympathetic....remember the posters at the 9/12 rallies

the hate ones , the Nazi ones....he is feeding red meat to these people. He is hurting our country.

They keep hiring him on despite past problems...

[Taverner]

28. Well, yeah. Don't get me wrong - I don't like him or his new Jim Crow Movement

But isn't he straight out of Shakespeare? As in, the Bastard son who's always up to no good?

[Doctor_J]

29. So the fluff piece did its job

be sure to send salon an e-mail thanking them for helping to understand this poor, unfortunate soul.

[Taverner]

30. Well in Salon's defense, it also showed me what an Asshole he is

Some of the things he did to other stations should be considered vandalism and harassment

[madfloridian]

31. I think it is an image...

of a very troubled man.. I would not call it a puff piece.

He is hurting our country, so I have no sympathy. Perhaps those who hire him on and those like him...will get a clearer picture of who they are getting.

[sasquatch]

32. The reason ClearChannel hired him was because he was a flunky they wanted to use to replace-

Bob Lassiter.

[get the red out]

33. He's a complete nut case

And he is giving legitimacy to insanity in the media.

The patient running the asylum.

[UTUSN]

34. Thanks!1 Here's another piece by the same author about SKOUSEN

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


************QUOTE*********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

*************UNQUOTE************

[defendandprotect]

35. My opinion is no one like this can stay on the air, unless someone is making sure he does...

Like Pat Buchanan . . . a disgusting sexist, racist, homophobic pig -- preaching hatred --

and religion -- why would GE sponsor him and keep him on the air for decades?

I not much at research, but this is a path mainly thru the right wing -- Houston -

and who is WFLA-Tampa?

And I'm not even sure, but presume Beck is now on Fox?

If so, we're not making things near as HOT enough for Fox as we should be!

And, this was also via MSNBC at one point?


As for the viewer -- it's a limited audience being taught to be dumb!

And that's true whether you're talking Rush, O'Reilly or Beck.

Who would do this work but really sick people?

[Rex]

36. Glenn Beck is bonkers and Fucksnews is just insane enough

to hire that bastard with a huge multi-million dollar contract. Insane people, lying to people around the world 24/7 - Dumbfucksnews.

[Hamlette]

37. kick to read later

[PA Democrat]

38. Beck made a reported $23 million in the past year selling his crap

to idiots. Hate is a very profitable product.

[madfloridian]

39. Limbaugh beat him financially by far.

Rush Limbaugh...5 homes in Palm Beach, 6 cars about half a million each.

And a 38 million dollar a year contract.

Yes, indeedy, hate pays well.

[PA Democrat]

40. Personally, they can keep their money.

Limbaugh has that big house and lives alone. Beck lives inside a walled fortress and you have to wonder what his kids think/ will think of him.

[madfloridian]

43. You are right. All that money doesn't buy respect.

[Hawkowl]

41. I look forward to his suicide

Unfortunately, I think all his blathering on about suicide and depression are just narcissistic screams for attention.

[scarface2004]

42. ratings are bs!

i doubt anybody but the gieco cavemen listen to this p o S!!

[UTUSN]

44. From Pt 2, his good-Boy exterior belies his vicious, personal CRUELTY

******************QUOTE*************

.... Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show ... Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. ....


...He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful." ....



"A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce (Kelly) apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby." ....

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.



The stunt was a textbook case of media marketing 101: Attention is good; controversy is better. Outrage is the gift that keeps on giving. ....

*******************UNQUOTE*************

[UTUSN]

45. Testing a highlighted version of the whole 3parter plus SKOUSEN

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


************QUOTE*********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

*************UNQUOTE************
3 PART ARTICLE:
**************QUOTE***********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/21/glenn_beck/

The making of Glenn Beck

His roots, from the alleged suicide of his mom to Top 40 radio to the birth of the morning zoo. Part 1 of 3



http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/22/glenn_beck_two/index.html

Glenn Beck becomes damaged goods

The radio phenom takes over the morning zoo, makes fun of miscarriages and flames out. Part 2 of 3

.... Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show ... Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. ....

...He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful." ....
Louisville is where Beck began experimenting with another streak that would become more pronounced in later years: militaristic patriotism and calls for the bombing of Muslims.

The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- ....

"A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce (Kelly) apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby." ....

"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."

"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.

The stunt was a textbook case of media marketing 101: Attention is good; controversy is better. Outrage is the gift that keeps on giving. ....


http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/23/glenn_beck_three/

Glenn Beck rises again

Getting clean, getting Mormon, getting talk radio -- and going to Yale, with the help of Joe Lieberman. Part 3 of 3

.... Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague. ....

One local politician who appreciated Beck's regular digs at the governor was the man who had defeated Weicker in a bitterly contested 1988 senate race: Democrat Joe Lieberman. Beck and the senator were friendly throughout the '90s, until they fell out over Lieberman's refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998. But before they parted ways, Lieberman would play a role in Beck's search for a worldview and identity by helping Beck enroll part-time at Yale in the fall of 1996. The ADHD-diagnosed Beck didn't last long at Yale. He took one class, "Early Christology," and dropped out. ....

"The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I'm like, 'But you fucking hated him!' "

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