Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [86]
To further investigate the conspiracy, Beck later invited renowned MexAmeriCanada scholar Jerome Corsi onto his show. Corsi became famous in 2004 for his powerful biography of Senator John Kerry, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. In 2008, Corsi would also become a staunch defender of the Obama birther theory. But in 2007, he was peddling his book The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada. During the interview, Beck peppered the distinguished author with challenging questions:
You’ve got the trans—the NAFTA superhighway that, again, everybody denies, but you’ve got it broken up in chunks being built right now. It will deliver goods from China right to Mexico through America into Canada. You say this stuff is going to eliminate the middle class. How?16
The MexAmeriCanada conspiracy worked better for Beck than the Iran- Russia-World War III bit, but it wasn’t quite evil enough. For one thing, there is no good way to draw an analogy between excessively wide highways and Nazi Germany. So Beck moved on to Al Gore’s campaign against global warming, which has more obvious parallels to the Third Reich. In April 2007, he did a radio show about a book that he was reading on the Nazis. Then he whipped in a bit of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. Then he whipped in a bit of Skousen’s world-government conspiracy theory. And voilà, instant fascist world-government conspiracy:
I understand World War II much, much better because we’re here again, gang. We are here again. And I read this one part on global warming about how they got—what was the first thing they did to get people to exterminate the Jews. 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. 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. You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power. That was Hitler’s plan. His enemy: the Jew. Al Gore’s enemy, the U.N.’s enemy: global warming.17
In presenting Al Gore as a cunning Hitler-like supervillain, Beck was warming up for his future role as chief witch hunter for the right wing. Comparisons between progressive bogeymen and murderous dictators would soon become a standard part of his repertoire.bt The accusation against Gore was also an impressive feat of Freudian projection. Glenn Beck, America’s preeminent fearmonger, stoked the fear that Al Gore was employing scare tactics—by gratuitously comparing him to history’s scariest fearmonger, Adolf Hitler. It’s so twisted that it’s genius.
Czar Wars
But Beck was just getting warmed up. He began broadcasting at Fox News on January 19, the eve of President Obama’s inauguration. By March, he had tripled his CNN primetime viewership and was rivaling O’Reilly and Hannity with 2.3 million viewers per show, an incredible feat for a program with a 5:00 p.m. timeslot.18 The New York Times called him “Fox News’s mad, apocalyptic, tearful rising star.”
With a mix of moral lessons, outrage and an apocalyptic view of the future, Mr. Beck, a longtime radio host who jumped to Fox from CNN’s Headline News channel this year, is capturing the feelings of an alienated class of Americans.bu19
At Fox News, Beck was ready to take his conspiracism to the next level. The one element that his CNN conspiracy theories lacked was bogeymen. For some reason, he didn’t play up foreigners like Ahmadinejad