Dana Milbank: Glenn Beck is Obsessed with Hitler and Woodrow Wilson
[Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for The Washington Post. This is an excerpt from an essay adapted from his book"Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America," forthcoming Tuesday. The full essay can be found here.]
Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur.
One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers:"Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?" A good question -- because"we" purchased Alaska in 1867. Another day, he gave his version of European history:"We have the Age of Enlightenment, 1620 to 1871, uh, 1781. This was a time when people said, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, we can think out of the box.' This is coming out of the Dark Ages." That was thinking outside of the box, because the Dark Ages ended in about 1000 AD, six centuries earlier than Beck claimed....
At the heart of Beck's technique of amplifying fringe theories is his obsession with Nazism. For much of the past 70 years, there has been an unwritten rule in U.S. political debate: Avoid Hitler accusations. Once you liken your opponent to the Nazis, any form of rational discussion becomes impossible. But Beck, it seems, has a Nazi fetish. In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24 mentions....
But lest you think Beck's Hitler obsession emerged merely when Obama reached the White House, Beck has also found Nazism in Al Gore's campaign against climate change."Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to -- you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them," Beck said on his radio show in 2007."It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was: Get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government."...
Unlike his Hitler fetish, Beck's obsession with Woodrow Wilson is of recent origin."I mean, I got to tell you, two years ago, I knew nothing about Woodrow Wilson," he told his viewers. But after reading a book on Wilson by conservative historian R.J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College, Beck decided to blame Wilson for just about everything bad in the world today -- including Barack Obama, born 37 years after Wilson died....
Read entire article at WaPo
Glenn Beck, the conservative television and radio host, is an amateur historian. Very amateur.
One day, he rhetorically asked his Fox News viewers:"Why did we buy Alaska in the 1950s?" A good question -- because"we" purchased Alaska in 1867. Another day, he gave his version of European history:"We have the Age of Enlightenment, 1620 to 1871, uh, 1781. This was a time when people said, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, we can think out of the box.' This is coming out of the Dark Ages." That was thinking outside of the box, because the Dark Ages ended in about 1000 AD, six centuries earlier than Beck claimed....
At the heart of Beck's technique of amplifying fringe theories is his obsession with Nazism. For much of the past 70 years, there has been an unwritten rule in U.S. political debate: Avoid Hitler accusations. Once you liken your opponent to the Nazis, any form of rational discussion becomes impossible. But Beck, it seems, has a Nazi fetish. In his first 18 months on Fox News, from early 2009 through the middle of this year, he and his guests invoked Hitler 147 times. Nazis, an additional 202 times. Fascism or fascists, 193 times. The Holocaust got 76 mentions, and Joseph Goebbels got 24 mentions....
But lest you think Beck's Hitler obsession emerged merely when Obama reached the White House, Beck has also found Nazism in Al Gore's campaign against climate change."Now, I'm not saying that anybody's going to -- you know, Al Gore's not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them," Beck said on his radio show in 2007."It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization. The goal is global carbon tax. The goal is the United Nations running the world. That is the goal. Back in the 1930s, the goal was: Get rid of all of the Jews and have one global government."...
Unlike his Hitler fetish, Beck's obsession with Woodrow Wilson is of recent origin."I mean, I got to tell you, two years ago, I knew nothing about Woodrow Wilson," he told his viewers. But after reading a book on Wilson by conservative historian R.J. Pestritto of Hillsdale College, Beck decided to blame Wilson for just about everything bad in the world today -- including Barack Obama, born 37 years after Wilson died....