Alt-America. David Neiwert
a North American Union, Beck said, “Sam, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts. However, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”
Beck announced he was making the leap to Fox News in October 2008, though his show did not begin running regularly until January 2009. Still, he gave the public a preview of where he was going with his new show in a mid-November appearance with Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, in which he ranted at length about the public’s evident tolerance—judging by election results—of a presidential candidate who had “palled around” with terrorists like William Ayers. Beck explained away the election as the result of “cakes and circuses and too many dumb people. I mean, we should thin out the herd, you know what I mean?” He also set the table for what was to come:
This is a total outrage, Bill. There is a disconnect in America. We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance, and I think we’re at a crossroads here. We’re still about here [points to spot on hand], where the roads are just starting to split, but pretty soon, this side and this side are not gonna understand each other at all, because we’re living in different universes.
It became clear early on that Beck was interested not in bridging this gap but in exploiting it. No sooner did his show, Glenn Beck, get started on Fox than he began focusing on the ideological aspects of Obama’s supposed radicalism. The show also featured an unusually maudlin tone; in his Fox debut on January 19, Beck became teary-eyed talking about Sarah Palin’s candidacy and how it made him feel like he “was not alone.” A few nights later he featured a segment in which he had the camera zoom in around his eyes as he delivered his monologue. When Stephen Colbert parodied it hilariously with a zoom camera operated by a proctologist, Beck came on and explained that he had done it because “we don’t look each other in the eyes” enough these days. A few weeks after this, in an hour-long program set up like a town-hall meeting, Beck again got choked up. “I just love my country—and I fear for it!” he blurted out.
Beck devoted most of his energy to the theme that President Obama was a far-left radical who intended to remake America into a totalitarian state. He had a problem, though, in figuring out just what kind of totalitarianism Obama was bringing: socialist, communist, or fascist. Over the course of the next several months, Beck began using all three terms to describe Obama’s agenda, often interchangeably—terms which by anyone’s lights but Beck’s actually represent profoundly different and distinct ideologies.
Beck’s show also featured an overarching apocalyptic sensibility. At various times, different dooms confronted the nation, according to Beck. He frequently fretted about the epidemic of violent crime by Mexican drug cartels south of the border, and hosted a hysterical discussion with the right-wing maven Michelle Malkin about the existential threat this posed to the United States. At other times he saw a global nuclear apocalypse looming in the form of a potential Middle East confrontation with Iran. But consistently the greatest threat to America was President Obama and his administration.
Soon Beck’s paranoia began reaching a fever pitch—he even flirted with the conspiracy theories that Obama was using the Federal Emergency Management Administration to secretly prepare concentration camps into which conservatives were about to be rounded up. Beck announced he was investigating claims: he told his audience that “we can’t disprove” the FEMA concentration camps story.
The FEMA camps claims dated back to the Militia of Montana and later gained traction under the auspices of Alex Jones’s radio rants. Patriot-movement leaders had been claiming since the 1990s that black helicopters had been spotted—their mission unclear but much speculated on; such stories were based purely on fabricated “evidence.” This, eventually, is what Glenn Beck reported back to his audience on his April 6, 2009, show, which featured a ten-minute segment with Jim Meigs, a Popular Science journalist, who looked into the claims and found them utterly spurious.
Beck was hardly chastened by the episode, and continued promoting beliefs held by militia groups in other arenas. On March 24 he had invited John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador, on his show for a discussion of the globalist propensities of the Obama White House. During the discussion Beck lurched off on his own tangent: “I mean, I think these guys—these guys, they’ll take away guns, they’ll take away our sovereignty, they’ll take away our, our, our currency, our money! They’re already starting to put all the global framework in with this bullcrap called global warming! This is an effort to globalize and tie together everybody on the planet, is it not?”
Taking away guns—that was one of the militias’ chief sources of paranoia in the 1990s, and now Beck was making the charge against Obama, too. Beck regularly warned his audience that “our rights are under attack,” including “the right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
The notion that Obama and his administration intended to go on a gun-grabbing spree became a recurring theme on Beck’s show. Twice he featured the president of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, in segments with a large chyron titled “Constitution Under Attack.” In April 2009 LaPierre suggested on Beck’s show that administration support for international efforts to adopt strict gun-licensing standards amounted to a United Nations plot: “They’re trying to pass, basically, a global gun ban on all individual possession of firearms ownership.”
The paranoia whipped up by the NRA (as usual with the gun-rights crowd) had no known basis in reality. In the list of thirteen priorities for action in Obama’s first year and beyond that was leaked to the New York Times, jobs and the economy completely predominated. Gun control was not on the list. Nor was there even a whisper of it from any Obama administration official in 2009.
Which, for the paranoid at heart, only proved once and for all that something nefarious was afoot.
Whether he was grounded in reality or not, Beck was tapping into something very real by promoting gun paranoia. In fact, one of the remarkable ways the fringe hysteria manifested itself in the real world after the election was in the astonishing surge in gun sales.
The initial spike occurred before the election, when firearms groups began noticing a surge in federal background checks for new gun purchases. In November alone, the number, 378,000 checks, was 42 percent greater than for the same month a year before. One gun-friendly outdoor news service named the new president its “Gun Salesman of the Year.”
The only time gun rights really made their way into the news was during the confirmation hearings for Eric Holder, the nominee for attorney general, where one of the voices testifying against his confirmation was a “gun rights expert,” Stephen Halbrook. Halbrook had authored a recent book about the Second Amendment. What upset the gun crowd about Holder was his support of the gun ban in DC, as well as an op-ed piece he had written in October 2001 for the Washington Post, “Keeping Guns Away from Terrorists.” The article largely was an eminently sensible column about closing up gun-sales loopholes used by many terrorists to obtain weapons.
Nonetheless, the fears that Obama was a closet gun-grabber secretly plotting against them became widespread, particularly in the rural areas where the right to bear arms is traditionally prized. Obama’s election produced a lightning bolt of fear among many, and they responded by a run on both guns and ammunition and even gunpowder.
“Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in history —bar none,” the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. Warnings like that—as well as Glenn Beck’s paranoid musings with Wayne LaPierre—produced predictable results among gun owners. “They’re like, ‘Hey, maybe I should buy one of these before they become illegal,’” one gun-shop owner told a reporter. “If you look in any NRA magazine or you’re into guns, you see a lot of bills that are in the works.”
At the NRA’s big annual convention in Arizona that May, all the talk was about the spike in gun sales. The footage coming out of Arizona was striking for the level of paranoia. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, warned for the camera: “Whenever they can, wherever they can, the Democrats want to take away the rights of law-abiding citizens to own and purchase a gun, a right that is guaranteed under