Quote:
Originally Posted by ThePhanastasio
Oh, ****. I thought for some reason he went to Cambridge. I don't know where that was stuck in my head. I must be on crack to think Glen Beck was ever in Cambridge. I feel like I heard that somewhere, and it just stuck in my head.
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Actually Glenn Beck attended the Harvard School of Divinity in
Cambridge Massachusetts for a semester and flunked out. Maybe that's how you ended up associating Glenn Beck with Cambridge.
Beck used to be a radio shock jock like Howard Stern who'd do and say outrageous things just to rile up his audience. His career came crashing down when he got addicted to alcohol and drugs.
He reinvented himself as a conservative radio talk show host but most of his ideas are recycled ideas from the right wing conspiracy obsessed John Birch Society.
In the early Fifties, the John Birch Society were among the most strident leaders of red scare in the United States. They believed such notable American leaders as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren were all part of a ongoing communist conspiracy that was global in scope and dated back to the beginning of the 20th Century.
At the height of the McCarthy era, the John Birch Society recruited a membership of 100,000 Americans who were gullible enough to accept their paranoid theories of history.
The Birch Society's membership began to decline in the late Fifties when they redbaited the moderate Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower. The Birch Society claimed Eisenhower was a "tool of the communists." It's one thing to attack a liberal Democrat for being sympathetic to socialism, but Eisenhower was moderate Republican and an American war hero who commanded the Allied Forces on the D-Day invasion to rid Europe of their Nazi occupation forces. Many prominent Republicans who previously supported the Birch Society withdrew their support when Birchers began accusing the elected Republican president of being a communist sympathizer.
Glenn Beck is responsible for reviving many of the outlandish, revisionist historical doctrines of the Birch Society. An author with ideological influence on Beck is W. Cleon Skousen , a prolific conservative political writer and an anti-communist supporter of the John Birch Society. Skousen believed that American political, social, and economic elites were working with communists to foist a world government on the United States.
Constitutional scholar Jack Rakove, of Stanford University, inspected Skousen’s books and seminars and pronounced them "a joke that no self-respecting scholar would think is worth a warm pitcher of spit." A 1971 review in the Mormon journal Dialogue also accused Skousen of "inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary," and also of promoting concepts that were "perilously close" to Nazism.
I think Beck's influence peaked in the United States when he became so drunk on power, he went off the deep-end with his slanderous attacks of public figures, especially Barack Obama. He lost his job at Fox News when Beck made the outrageous claim that Barack Obama has repeatedly shown "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture", saying "I'm not saying he doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist."
Beck's hate mongering remarks about Obama resulted in an organized consumer boycott of his show's advertisers. 57 different advertisers removed their ads from his program, to avoid associating their brands with content that could be considered offensive by potential customers.