Your defense of Glenn Beck is touching on AOL, but it comes up very short and very sad. You claim that the big bad lefty meanie comedians are picking on Beck even when he is sick. Well, let's get something straight. Glenn Beck is inciting violence and helping legitimizing radical militia and white nationalist movements that otherwise would still be chatting on their MySpace pages. And the hatred that he is helping to unleash on this country is indefensible.

He was the butt of a few jokes by comedians at a time that you disapprove of. OK, are you now saying that the ADL is also being mean to him when they call him the "fearmonger in chief?" Will you weep for him over that too?

What did you think of those gun-brandishing "patriots" who showed up for teabagger protests? Were you happy to see all that vitriol targeted at President Obama by a lot of clueless robots who are out their because of talkers like Beck who have only one goal in mind -- to tear down this president after Bush and conservatism tore down our country for the last eight years?

It's not as though Beck himself hasn't been demonizing people -- his McCarthyite attacks on a number of people have not only been absurdly distorted but viciously personal. And it's not as though Beck is an innocent in the media personal-attack game; indeed, you may recall that he was responsible for one of the ugliest on-air smears in broadcast history: When Beck had a falling-out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market, Beck embarked on a series of dirty tricks, including an invasion of Kelly's wedding. But Beck hit a new low a little later:

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

Two wrongs don't make a right, and here at C&L we've avoided making it personal with Beck (beyond pointing out his utter lunacy). Just because we choose to pitch clean, though, doesn't mean we much mind seeing a toxic clown like Beck face a little chin music.

Please, spare us the tears and defend somebody who truly deserves it.

John Amato...

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Glenn Beck has apparently decided he doesn't care how big a public nutcase he is making himself into. Because, you know, the black helicopters are coming!!!!!! And he's just the guy to get the warning out.

Back when he started his Fox show in January, I wondered how long it would take Beck to become an outright Patriot conspiracy-monger -- especially because he dabbled in it early on, and it's been building ever since. I knew we had to be getting close when Beck's buddy Chuck Norris went full-bore militia earlier this week.

So the answer is: about ten and a half months. Because yesterday on his show, he just threw the chips all in and went for your classic militia black-helicopter conspiracy theory:

Beck: On the scale of insane things, I want to show what we skipped past. Ready? Look at this. Put it up here. We're in a recession now. People argue over whether we're even in a recession! We're in a deep recession. I think we're on the edge of a depression because of what we're doing.

OK, so, we have skipped a deep recession and skipped depression -- even the Great Depression -- we went right to the collapse of the dollar. Then he went right to global currency. One world government! And a New World Order! [Slaps] Like that!

That certainly is an interesting "scale of insane things," isn't it? Especially considering how insane you have to be to believe we've actually progressed beyond "recession." Insane, indeed.

Anyway, Beck then brings on the capital-investment adviser who sent Beck completely around the bend with his snippet on CNBC speculating that the ultimate solution to the economy would be "global government": Damon Vickers of Nine Points Capital Partners. Vickers is a longtime nutcase who in fact was coming fresh off the Alex Jones show earlier this week, expounding on this same theory. (Fun note: A year ago, Vickers predicted Microsoft was "going nowhere but down." That was when its stock price was at 13. Now it's above 30.)

There's a reason the ADL officially dubbed Beck our national "Fearmonger in Chief" this week. And there's a reason militias are springing up like mushrooms everywhere.

And the reason is that Glenn Beck has a national TV network show on which he is not only permitted but encouraged to promote complete wingnuttery whose sole purpose is to make Americans fearful, paranoid and angry.

I put together a compendium of Beck's finest fearmongering of just the past year on Fox, inspired largely by the instances cited by the ADL -- with a few of our own favorite moments thrown in for good measure.

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Chuck Norris seems to have been hanging out listening to his good buddy Glenn Beck a bit much these days.

He went on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show yesterday and regurgitated a lot Beck's talking points about how Obama is radically transforming the country, but took them the next logical step into militia-style black-helicopter territory.

What had him all worked up was Obama's pending trip to Copenhagen to help negotiate a global-warming treaty:

Norris: I really think he's going over there to try to create a one world order. And I think --

Cavuto: Well, what's your big worry?

Norris: My big worry is the fact is that we, as a nation, if we start having to be, ah, obligated to other countries. Like -- in this conference, they're going to try to take our money and send it to third-world countries, because we spend so much oil, and so other countries have suffered, and they want to give our money to these, uh, third world countries.

Neil, we have people here who are starving in our own country. I -- you know, my foundation, I have families who are making nine thousand dollars a year -- the kids that I'm teaching. Why aren't we trying to help the poverty in our own country?

Nevermind, of course, that we have this thing called to Aid to Families With Dependent Children and a host of other poverty-fighting programs -- aka "welfare" -- that work reasonably well in attacking poverty in the USA. Except that funding for these programs keeps getting cut by right-wing anti-tax nutcases who think like Chuck Norris.

No, what really is bothering Chuck is that looming New World Order. This is also why he doesn't believe in global warming: "I don't believe it for a second. I think it's a big con game that they're doing."

And if Obama indeed hands over our "sovereignty"?

Who knows what's going to happen. God forbid this happens in our country. Our country as we know it now will no longer exist, Neil, that's the whole thing right there.

A little later, he brought up health-care reform as a signal event in the New World Order takeover:

Norris: I'll tell you what, the thing that worries me the most is this health-care bill. And why I'm scared about it -- it's not about the health care. It's about the provisions that are in that bill.

One, is that if this thing passes, the government will have the right to come into our home and regulate how we raise our children. I found that in the bill.

Cavuto, to his credit, wasn't buying: "I don't believe that."

Give it a day or two. I bet Glenn Beck does.

[Warning: Naked self-promotion ahead.]

My book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right continues to attract a lot of interest, partly because it so clearly anticipated the current descent into madness of mainstream conservatives, currently drowning in a lake of right-wing extremism. I didn't predict tea parties, but I did warn that '90s-style militia wingnuttery was about to swamp the Republican Party, and I do explain how this is happening.

So this week I was the featured interview at Amanda Marcotte's podcast at RH Reality Check. We specifically focused on the way right-wing domestic terrorists have had a profound impact on women's reproductive rights. This is a brief interview; it starts at about the 8-minute mark and continues to the 24-minute mark.

And I was also featured as the live guest on Second Life for this week's episode of Virtually Speaking on BlogTalkRadio.

This is an hourlong session and fairly broad-ranging. It was fun for me because I've known Jay Ackroyd for over 10 years -- online (we useta post at the old Slate forum The Fray back in the day), but we only finally met in person this summer at Netroots Nation. We talk about posting at Crooks and Liars, among other things. I also get to talk about my favorite moment of the past year: Having been the guy who made Sarah Palin crazy enough to try to have McCain lie, thereby cementing her rep as a diva among the McCain campaign.

It's now been a full year since I've been at C&L. I think I'll celebrate by running the video that made Palin crazy, which occurred my first week here:

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Meanwhile, John Amato and I are ensconced in the writing process this weekend for our upcoming book from PoliPoint Press: Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane. (Due out next spring.) We'll have more details as we get closer.

In the meantime, I'd like to say thanks to the community of readers and commenters here at C&L for welcoming me so warmly and making me feel right at home from the start. It's been a blast, with lots more to come.

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Rob Waters at Hatewatch happened to catch the above short-lived video the other day:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

As the post notes in an update, the video was taken down shortly after it appeared on the SPLC site with no explanation. However, we managed to capture it before then and have reproduced it here in its original form, with a C&L tag at the end.

The "National Militia, Soldiers of Freedom" is not a known organization of any kind. Most likely it is some guy sitting in his basement.

This is about 99.99999999 percent certain to be just so much hot air from the "Patriot" movement and its attendant lunatic fringe. It reminds me of the threat to organize a "Million Man Militia" march back in July that never came close to materializing.

These kinds of delusions of grandeur are endemic to the Patriot movement, and are part and parcel of the grand paranoia about a looming New World Order planning to imprison conservatives and the radical communist regime of Barack Obama. That is, not only do they wildly imagine the nefarious conspiracy out to destroy America, but their imaginations similarly run riot when assessing their own breadth and strength -- not mention their abilities to act on their fantasies.

Still, the spread of this kind of rhetoric underscores the violent mindset of the militia units we now see forming at various locales around the country. Eventually, someone competent is going to act on it. And it's clearly being abetted by the wild fearmongering being promulgated by the likes of Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits.

Indeed, you have to wonder if this is the kind of thing Glenn Beck had in mind in his recent interview with Newsmax:

"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."

Of course, I think we can predict now that if there is another Oklahoma City -- rather than a 9/11 -- Glenn Beck will also be calling it a "Reichstag moment" and claiming it's the product of a government conspiracy to clamp down on civil rights.

This is why he and the rest of the right-wing chorus have been so eager to dismiss the existence of right-wing extremists -- even in the face of obvious evidence that the violent crazies are coming out of the woodwork. We can thank the tea parties for providing the fertile ground for much of this rhetoric.

If you want a sampling of how bad it's getting, check out the video below, which I captured from the same YouTube site as the one that hosted the "warning" video. The owner stocks it up with Alex Jones conspiracy videos, but this profile of the militias caught my eye:

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Phyllis Schlafly's How to Take Back America and Destroy it in the Process event this past weekend sure was chock full of nuts. What used to take place in the backrooms of the '90s militia-white power meetings is now on full display to America via the religious right and other assorted right-wing outfits. How sad this is happening to America at a time when the country and the world for that matter are struggling to get through the day. People are trying to find work, pay their bills and not go broke because of their lack of health insurance and now they are getting besieged by a stealth attack of Obama is Hitler garbage.

Lee Fang:

At the How To Take Back America Conference last weekend, conservative speaker Kitty Werthmann led a workshop called “How to recognize living under Nazis & Communists.” Announcing the panel in a column preceding the conference, talk show host Janet Porter gushed how Werthmann’s description of Austria in the 1930s is a “mirror to America” today — noting “They had Joseph Goebbels; we have Mark Lloyd, the diversity czar.” The room was packed over capacity to hear Werthmann, who grew up as a Christian in Austria and serves as Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum South Dakota President.

During her session, Werthmann went through a litany of examples of how President Obama is like Adolf Hitler. She noted that Hitler, who acted “like an American politician,” was “elected in a 100% Christian nation.” Although she failed to once mention Antisemitism or militarism, Werthmann explained how universal healthcare, an Equal Rights Amendment, and increased taxes were telltale signs of Nazism. Werthmann also warned the audience:

If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. [...] Take back America. Don’t let them take the country into Socialism. And I refer again, Hitler’s party was National Socialism. [...] And that’s what we are having here right now, which is bordering on Marxism.

These freaks are preaching violence to the conservative base and it's sickening. Violence is spreading like wildfire in America (Just ask the Pittsburgh police after the Richard Poplawski incident) because of them even though they'll deny they had a hand in it like Bill O'Reilly did when Dr. Tiller was murdered. And there will always be a Juan Williams to defend their hate speak at every turn.

If you've forgotten how they operate just read this post and you'll cringe.

I think someone needs to alert the DHS about this since it falls within their guidelines on extremism. Watching Kitty speak just re-enforces the report and explains why the right freaked out over it when it initially became public.

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Probably the most ironic -- no, make that flat-out bizarre -- aspect of Glenn Beck's ultimately successful campaign to force out Van Jones is that it was predicated on Jones' supposed indulgence in extremist rhetoric ideas.

This isn't just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black. It's more like the black hole calling the sunspot dark.

Glenn Beck's history of indulging in extremism -- not just turning a blind eye to its presence, but promoting it outright to an audience of millions -- is so deep and wide that whatever indiscretions Jones might be guilty of fade into total insignificance.

Of course, we're all familiar with the remarks that lie at so much of the root of this matter: Beck's outrageous claims that President Obama is a "racist" who has a "deep-seated hatred of white people", which prompted a largely succesful campaign by Color of Change to encourage advertisers to pull their support for Beck's Fox News program. But that, frankly, is barely scratching the surface.

Keith Olbermann has put out a plea for information about Beck's own background in outrageous remarks. Of course, all he probably needs to do is go through the C&L archives on Beck for everything he needs.

Still, what Olbermann -- and everyone else wondering how to fight back from this latest round of right-wing viciousness -- should focus on is the inordinate number of times that Beck has simply promoted extremist ideas and memes straight out of the most fringe elements of the American far right.

It goes back several years. Beck, in fact, openly promoted the John Birch Society and its "New World Order" conspiracy theories frequently when he was still at CNN Headline News. As I observed at the time:

Beck is busy building a narrative that not only opens the Pandora's Box of mass public consumption of far-right conspiracism, it also portrays the most hateful and paranoid and poisonous bloc of American politics as credible and normative.

Since joining Fox in January of this year, however, the tendency has not only intensified, it's simply gone off the rails.

Most notably, Beck has actively promoted ideas, theories, and concepts taken directly from the far-right "Patriot"/militia movement, many of which in turn derive from the ugliest sector of the right, white supremacy:

-- He "war-gamed" out an apocalytpic American future in which society has completely crumbled, leaving behind a "Road Warrior" society in which militias remained the only defenders of the remnants of white society.

-- He told his audience for several weeks running that he "could not disprove" the existence of concentration camps run by FEMA in which conservatives were to be rounded up. After a few weeks of this, he finally ran a segment that in fact did debunk these claims, explaining that in reality all of the supposed "evidence" for these camps was the product of a long-running hoax that began in the 1990s with the "Patriot"/militia movement. (He then later claimed that he had done nothing to promote these theories.)

-- He ran several segments, including one on his radio show, in which he promoted the concept of the secession of Texas from the Union. A little later, he tried to pretend he didn't agree with the concept while in fact giving a secessionist the opportunity to promote his plans to Beck's audience.

-- He regularly promoted "one world government" paranoia. This included a supposed plot to put us all on a global currency controlled by the New World Order.

-- He tried to argue that the chief cause of the sour economy was the United States' reliance on a central banking system.

-- He hosted an entire hourlong segment devoted to promoting militia-derived constitutional theories about state sovereignty.

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August 12, 2009 News Corp

Matthew Balan at Newsbusters is unhappy because a CNN chryon identified Shawna Forde's killer-Minuteman gang "extremists", while Rick Sanchez talked a bit about how Forde had been a player in the movement:

A chyron which accompanied a report on CNN’s Newsroom program on Wednesday about the arrest of a leader of an organization inspired by the Minuteman Project, referred to her and her accused accomplices as “extremists.” Despite qualifying how the largest Minuteman organization had distanced itself from the suspects, anchor Rick Sanchez questioned how she became a “player in the anti-immigration movement.”

OK, so if Balan doesn't want to call Forde's gang of thugs "extremists," what would he call this?

Accused ringleader Shawna Forde told her family in recent months that she had begun recruiting members of the Aryan Nations and that she planned to begin robbing drug-cartel leaders, her brother Merrill Metzger said Monday in a telephone interview from Redding, Calif.

"She was talking about starting a revolution against the United States government," he said.

... "She sat right here on my couch and told me that she was going to start an underground militia. This militia was going to start robbing drug-cartel dealers — rob them and steal their money or drugs," Metzger said.

... Investigators think the May 30 robbery was intended to be the first in a series of such attacks intended to fund the border-watch group and a new venture, O'Connor said. Forde planned on starting a business of helping free kidnap victims in other countries, he said.

Oh, and then they shot a 9-year-old girl and her father to death in cold blood.

And yes, Forde indeed was a player in the Minuteman movement, appearing on TV as a Minuteman spokesperson and onstage with Jim Gilchrist here in the Northwest.

What, exactly, does Balan think Sanchez should have reported?

Now, Sanchez never suggests that the larger Minuteman movement might be riddled with extremists, but that seems to be what Balan is accusing him of doing. Or at least sidling up too close to that proposition.

Well, tell ya what, Matthew: We'll gladly say it here. The Minuteman movement is and always has been an extremist movement, and so it is no surprise to see it devolve in its decaying phase into a radical and violent one.

Oh yes, and you know what else? It's a big moneymaking scam, too.

But I guess you're unhappy unless they're described as a big "neighborhood watch." Yeah, that fits 'em to a T, eh?

Here's what's actually noteworthy about all this: Unlike CNN, you'll never see this story reported on Fox. In fact, I haven't seen a single mention of this story on Fox TV. Gee, I wonder why that is. Well, no I don't.