There’s a moment in pretty much every spy/undercover cop type movie when the hero, usually fresh off some foul deed done for the greater good, has to look in a mirror. The face is the same, but something has changed. That’s the moment when the difference between pretending and believing starts to get fuzzy.
On Monday, reacting to events in Egypt, Glenn Beck may have reached that same point. This remarkable video, linked in places too numerous to mention, comes from Beck’s January 31st show on FOX News. In its twelve rambling minutes, in which even his cameramen and stagehands have a hard time keeping up with him, Beck makes two things abundantly clear. The first is that he’s becoming untethered from even the hard right mainstream of conservative politics. The second is that because of the first FOX is likely going to be compelled to fire him sooner rather than later.
Right at the opening of Monday’s show, Beck says:
“No one’s quite sure whose side to be on. This isn’t about politics, this is about world denomination.”
There’s a lot to unpack there, but the big takeaway has to be the way he’s so wedded to a Manichean view of the world that he interprets every action as being either purposefully Good or Bad. (Note the Freudian slip of “denomination” when he meant “domination”.) This is classic conspiracist thinking, in which the complexity and randomness of the world are ignored in favor of all encompassing explanations that put deliberate human agency at the center of everything. Beck’s is a world without the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Beck follows up that tidy encapsulation of his worldview with this piece of rather astonishing imagination:
“I believe that I can make a case in the end that there are three powers that you will see really emerge. One, a Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe. Two, China, that will control Asia, the southern half of Africa, part of the Middle East, Australia, maybe New Zealand, and God only knows what else. And Russia, which will control all of the old former Soviet Union bloc, plus maybe the Netherlands. I’m not really sure. But their strong arm is coming. That leaves us and South America. What happens to us?”
That China has designs on New Zealand and Russia on the Netherlands would likely come as a surprise to both countries, not to mention the people in those soon to be conquered territories. And those are just the least insane parts. Frankly, given the planetary scale of these prophesied takeovers, it’s amazing South America was spared.
Like most conspiracy theories, the sheer, unadulterated lunacy of this makes it practically impossible to refute. If someone asks you to prove conclusively that the gnomes living in their hair can’t really predict the stock market, where do you start? The stock market? The gnomes? Time itself? At the above link, Steve Benen writes:
I’m still torn on whether Beck actually believes his own insanity, but his viewers are nevertheless being instructed to begin “storing food” because we’re witnessing the “coming insurrection.”
Benen being torn over whether Beck is actually crazy or just faking it for the gold plated Section 8 of book deals and radio money doesn’t matter as much as whether or not Beck is torn about it. Beck’s a good actor, no doubt about it, but after enough time playing the same part, even a skilled faker can begin to lose sight of the line between himself and his role. Remember, while Beck’s been on the radio for decades, he’s only been nationally famous for a couple of years now. And for a guy like him greater fame and influence mean fewer and fewer reality checks from producers, executives, or anyone else.
What makes this fascinating in a morbid kind of way is that this may be the most public descent into madness to ever be so comprehensively filmed and documented. Beck is a guy with a popular radio show and a weekly television program, he’s got an enormous amount of airtime to fill with content, and that means that what he’s basically doing is thinking in public. Even with plenty of staffers to help with the writing and the “research”, Beck doesn’t have time to carefully consider everything that comes out of his mouth, and that’s a bad combination for someone who’s become noticeably more agitated and unhinged in the roughly two years he’s been a serious national star.
About the 9:00 minute mark of the original video is where Beck begins to go full Time Cube, ranting about unrelated places being on fire and, oddly enough, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which is a particular hobbyhorse of his. It’s that last point where Beck is most clearly signaling his intentions to sail into very troubled waters. References to the massive conflagration of World War I, statements like “I believe a snowball is being formed, and it is starting to roll”, these are the calling cards of an apocalyptic prophet. And there is only one thing all apocalyptic prophets have in common: they’re always wrong.
If he continues along this path, at some point he’s going to be so spectacularly wrong about something that FOX and anyone else even semi-respectable will have to cut ties with him. The cesspool of radio will always welcome him, of course, but Beck is on an unsustainable course right now. The flameout is going to be spectacular, whenever it ends up happening.
