Live Q&As

I hereby challenge Glenn Beck to a debate!

I'd even be okay with him kicking me off the set in the middle of the discussion and then saying bad things about me -- the way he did to the guy from Acorn.

Beck, however, will not agree to that.  He only hears from those who will echo him.

Two points about this.   The first is the old complaint about the deplorable state of American civics/history education, which makes it easier than you think to fool 2 million of the people all of the time.  Also, there is a gripping internal logic to Beck's arguments. Once you accept the original (false) premise, the rest of the show follows fairly logically from there.  That's why I find it so difficult to stop watching Beck once I've started.  This is also why I have watched Beck so you don't have to.

First suggestion. Buy the book!

The short answer is he didn't attend college (except for one course at Yale that he took with Joe Lieberman's intervention), instead going into the itinerant life of the Morning Zoo radio host.

Good question.   I certainly don't accept that he's an idiot, and I think the notion that he's "crazy" (he perpetuates that himself) is wrong, too.   He is simply a brilliant showman and perhaps the greatest opportunist in America today.  A dozen years ago he was a pony-tail wearing pro-choice morning radio guy.   Two years ago he said the TARP bank bailout wasn't big enough.   Now he's the leader of the Tea Party movement.  Pure genius.

Ain't gonna happen.  Beck is in some ways larger than Fox News.  All they can do is plead with him to rein it in a bit.  

I do make the point in the book that  Beck is a problem for Fox, which after all does have some reputable journalists doing good work.    I suspect that time is not on Beck's side.  Either he will say something (even more) beyond the pale, and flame out, or the economy will improve, anger at the government will relax, and he will fade away.

Who am I to question?  I used a couple of other comparisons in the book.  One is Orson Welles, one of the great charlatans of the 20th century; Beck named his business after Welles's Mercury Theater and said he was inspired by the way Welles fooled people.  The other is Father Coughlin, the great anti-FDR radio demagogue of the 1930s.   Did a chapter putting Beck's words and Coughlin's side by side: I challenge you to tell the two men apart.

Woodrow Wilson should sue, except he's under a fairly heavy stone slab at the National Cathedral.

Interestingly, Glenn Beck himself has been surprisingly litigious.  When a prankster set up a web site falsely claiming Beck raped and murdered a young girl 20 years ago  (the "proof" of this was the Beckian standard: he hadn't denied it)  Beck took the legal rout to force the guy to take down the hoax site.

Thank you for mentioning me in the same sentence as Jon Stewart.  Sadly, neither he nor Colbert will have me on to talk about Beck and the book.   This is evidence that the "radical left and stealth jihad" you speak of is not very well coordinated.

But he just told Bill O'Reilly last week that he has nothing against Obama personally!

I'm amazed that the administration is so frightened of him.  The worst case, of course, was when the person firing Shirley Sherrod said it was because her supposedly "racist" statement was going to be on Glenn Beck.

An interesting footnote: Beck made a big deal on Fox that he had passed on the story, claiming it didn't meet his standard.  But he had already gone after Sherrod on his radio show.

And Sarah Palin wrote the tribute!

Old and scared.

Much more about this in the book, but you can tell a great deal from the advertisers on his shows and for his live events: assisted living, gold, and a "seed bank" you can use to plant a garden in your yard after the apocalypse comes.

I think both Fox's rise and the militas are coming from the same source of far-right anger.  Don't forget that there was no Fox News the last time the militias were prominent, in the 90s.   Beck is thriving on the same anger that is rebuilding the militias.

That said, there's a chapter in the book about violence committed by people who got their inspiration from Beck.   He has taken conspiracy theories that previously existed only on the fringes and brought them into the mainstream.

You just have a dirty mind.  Think of tea bagging in the sense of sand bagging.   Beck has fooled America, not done some sexual act to it.  (Also, the subtitle is in smaller print)

I don't think it's thinly veiled.

Whole chapter on this in the book.   In short, I don't think Beck is a racist any more than I think he believes the world is going to end in the next few months.  But on both counts, he encourages people who do hold those thoughts.

I think they both rely on WorldNetDaily.

Call me crazy but I think O'Reilly actually has serious journalistic instincts.  I suspect he's horrified by Beck but has embraced him out of survival.  

Yes, but half of those liberals work for Media Matters.

Very hard to out crazy Glenn.  Although, as I point out, his craziness is alarmingly sane.

Buy the book!

I've probably got a better shot with Stewart/Colbert.  

 I think it's beyond dispute that he has brought the fringe into the mainstream.  That's also the view the Anti Defamation League took after a guy who had posted a Beck video on a Nazi website killed four cops.

See-- this is why it's difficult to have a discussion about Beck.   If you watch Beck every day, everything seems true because it's all internally logical.  You just have to swallow his original suppositions, which generally turn out to be wrong.

 Beck very much operates by the Coulter principle:  that in order to continue to expand your audience, you need to outdo yourself each time in shock value.   He's just much better at it than she is.