via Neiwert:

Basically, Beck foresees a Middle Eastern "Caliphate" overtaking Europe and China controlling big chunks of new territory, all fueled by a "Marxist" and "Islamist" conspiracy:

Beck; 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?

As the uprising in Egypt has dominated our news coverage, it's interesting watching Conservatives split apart over how America and President Obama should be handling himself over the issue. On one hand you have Dick Morris nastily screaming at Obama and saying: Dick Morris thinks Obama administration should back Mubarak and his thugs, 'aggressively confront' protesters while others like John Fund think Obama has handled it very well. Bill Kristol entered into their debate and says fools like Glenn Beck marginalize themselves just like the Birchers did back in the 60's with their conspiracy theories.

Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it's a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it's a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

I've often written how the GOP has been hijacked by the Bircher faction of their party so it's not news to me. Rich Lowry of the NRO agrees with Kristol and remember, the fight for Conservatism began between Robert Welch and William F. Buckley.

William F. Buckley: Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me

The society had been founded in 1958 by an earnest and capable entrepreneur named Robert Welch, a candy man, who brought together little clusters of American conservatives, most of them businessmen. He demanded two undistracted days in exchange for his willingness to give his seminar on the Communist menace to the United States, which he believed was more thoroughgoing and far-reaching than anyone else in America could have conceived. His influence was near-hypnotic, and his ideas wild. He said Dwight D. Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” and that the government of the United States was “under operational control of the Communist party.” It was, he said in the summer of 1961, “50-70 percent” Communist-controlled...read on