Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [94]
Progressive Hunter
The first against the wall, Beck often warns his audience, will be one Glenn Beck. He gravely prophesied, “We’re coming to a time when voices like mine will disappear . . . There is Soros money now being funneled to stop me.”51 Sometimes, he even compares himself to great civil rights leaders: “While Martin Luther King had to face German shepherds, we have to face SEIU and leftist thugs.”52 Beck did not explain how he has managed to evade Soros and friends thus far, especially since he works in Manhattan, the heart of enemy territory. He once even dined in the same restaurant as Soros.53 Miraculously, Soros did not attempt to eat him. Perhaps the prayers of Beck’s devotees, whom he regularly asks to pray for his protection, have been effective.
Of course, Beck’s frequent alarm sirens about threats to his career constitute one more act of projection. While the progressives may not be hunting him, he is surely hunting them. He boasted to his radio listeners:
I am going to be like the Israeli Nazi hunters. I’m telling you, I’m going to find these big progressives, and to the day I die, I’m going to be a progressive hunter. I’m going to find these people who have done this to our country and expose them. I don’t care if they’re in nursing homes. I’m going to expose what they have done and make sure that the people understand because our Constitution, our Republic, if it survives, it will only survive because the people are waking and through the grace of God because we are that close to losing our Republic.54
But Nazi hunting is a poor analogy. Most Nazi hunters discreetly track war criminals and then deliver the information to national governments for extradition and prosecution. Beck, in contrast, aims to publicly shame innocent men and women whose politics he finds suspect, most of them minorities. He is no Nazi hunter. Glenn Beck is a witch hunter.
And he is very good at his job. Van Jones resigned from the White House Council on Environmental Quality after Beck revealed that he had endorsed the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration had deliberately allowed the World Trade Center attacks. That prompted Beck to say with a straight face, “I am the guy who debunked conspiracy theory.”55 Next, after a long siege by Beck and Fox News, ACORN finally disbanded when a right-wing journalist posing as a pimp video-taped an ACORN employee advising him on the sex trade business.cf And in 2010, Andy Stern, having transformed SEIU into the fastest-growing union in the country, decided that it was a good time to retire.
You would think that the exodus of progressivism’s most prominent leaders would be a major triumph for Beck, but as we have repeatedly seen, success only makes the right wing more paranoid. Within days of Van Jones’s resignation, Beck argued that in leaving the administration, Jones had become even more powerful: “He’s no longer restricted in what he can say or do, and this man is a dangerous man.”56 After ACORN disbanded, Beck warned, “Don’t fall for the silly ruse that ACORN, by the way, is out of business.”57 When Andy Stern resigned, Beck speculated, “There’s something wrong with this Andy Stern resignation . . . Something is up there.”58
As we observed previously, political victory affirms the shaky psychological rationalizations upon which the conspiracy theories are precariously perched. When Beck says, “Wake up, America!” he is proselytizing. When he says, “America is waking up!” it means that his proselytizing has been effective. That is to say, Beck has concluded that the country is coming around to his point of view, which confirms that he must be on to something. Van Jones’s resignation did not prove to Beck that the