Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [89]
Beck then appealed to his audience, his voice quiet and heavy with anguish, gradually increasing in volume, swelling with anger, “How? How, America? I ask this sincerely. Show me where I have it wrong. I want to be wrong, but I can’t find any other way to explain this. The president is wearing a mask. He has surrounded himself with radicals and revolutionaries.” By then Beck had reached a full shout, “He has surrounded himself his whole life with radicals and revolutionaries!”
In this powerful jeremiad, Glenn Beck went well beyond the guilt-by-association tactics that Sean Hannity employed before Obama’s election. Beck’s point was not simply that Obama “pals around” with black nationalists and communist revolutionaries. His point was that Obama is a black nationalist and a communist revolutionary. By juxtaposing their speeches in quick succession, Beck blurs these three men together. They are all angry black men who hate white people; they are all secretly building a communist revolution to redistribute the wealth and privileges of the whites they despise to the American Indians, the immigrants, and the people of color. Thus, Beck deftly combined conspiratorial villainy with the white persecution narrative.bx
Like O’Reilly’s caricature of George Soros, Beck’s amalgamation of Obama, Jones, and Wright plays off a popular archetype from American culture—the Black Radical. The Black Radical archetype may be less familiar to younger readers, but Glenn Beck, who grew up in the 1970s, surely knows it well. Black radicals were African American civil rights activists who advocated a socialist or communist revolution. Many black radicals sanctioned violence, such as H. Rap Brown, who was imprisoned for armed robbery after a police shootout; Robert F. Williams, who fled to Cuba after trumped-up kidnapping charges were lodged against him; and Donald DeFreeze, leader of the Symbionese Liberation Army that kidnapped Patty Hearst.
The Black Radical archetype also showed up in Hollywood, taking the form of villains and sidekicks who were portrayed as violent and dogmatic. For example, the 1976 movie Network, which features the “mad as hell” Howard Beale character that Glenn Beck so admires, included two black radicals: a dogmatic communist organizer named Laureen Hobbs (“I’m Laureen Hobbs, a badass commie nigger”) and a domestic terrorist called the Great Ahmed Kahn. Thus, Beck told his audience, not in so many words, that our president is a “badass commie nigger” who is preparing to realize the Black Radical dream of redistributing income to his nonwhite “brothers.”
The Revolution
Phase I: Nationalize Private Industries
Unlike the archetypal Black Radical, however, Obama’s revolution would not be violent, at least not at first. According to Beck, Obama’s tactics are modeled after those of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez was democratically elected, but he has used his power to nationalize private industries, take control of the media, and incarcerate critics. One of Beck’s Fox News programs is titled “Is Obama Taking Pointers from Hugo Chavez?” During the show, Beck represented the federal bank and auto industry bailouts as a stealth nationalization plan equivalent to Chavez’s takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry.
Phase II: Control the Media
Then to prove that Obama planned to control the media as Chavez has done, Beck introduced yet another African American czar: Mark Lloyd, chief diversity officer of the Federal Communications Commission, a.k.a. FCC diversity czar. According to Beck, Lloyd is a “Marxist, communist, fascist” who idolizes Hugo Chavez and plans to use his awesome powers as chief