W. Cleon Skousen

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Glenn Beck is unique among the right wing rabble rousing talking heads.  While Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reily etc, say what their followers want to hear as a way to make millions Glenn Beck really is insane and actually believes all or most of the nonsense he spouts.  That is probably why he has become insanely popular among the insane of the radical right.  But what is the source of Beck's right wing brand of insanity?  Over at Salon Alexander Zaitchik explains that it is an X-FBI man who was not trusted by the FBI, a crazy right winger who was too crazy for the right wing, a Mormon who was too nutty for the nutty Mormons and a police chief who was fired by a conservative mayor for running his own Gestapo.  Yes, it's one man - W. Cleon Skousen.

Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on Sept. 12, the
day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks,
sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of "Don't Tread on
Me" T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker placards.
The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce the
president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.

Even
if the turnout wasn't the 2 million that some conservatives tried,
briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the
Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain
strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has
harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and
organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together
six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it
had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the
so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's
life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan
lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears.
Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid
Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most
susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric
distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they
are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer
and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year
Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too
extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but
Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and
introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Zaitchik continues with a biography Skousen, which is well worth a read, and closes with Beck's involvement.

Glenn Beck's first public reference to anything Skousen seems to
have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Real America,"
was a chapter titled "The Enemy Within." It consisted of a list titled
"Communist Goals of 1963." The list was originally published in
Skousen's 1958 book "The Naked Communist," and was submitted to the
Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck
identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of "The Real America" to
ponder Skousen's list, then "check off" those goals already achieved by
America's new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck's view:
"liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU."

It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting
for Skousen's books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck's
sent him "The 5,000 Year Leap." In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer.
Paul Skousen, Skousen's son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon
by e-mail, without giving dates: "As I understand it, Glenn Beck was
given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly
the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been
trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make
sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he
began mentioning it on his show."

Whatever the circumstances,
Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first
brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck's radio show is
Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed
conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, "Have you ever read any Skousen?
Have you read -- do you remember 'The Naked Communist'? I went back and
reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You
look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It's all
been done." Horowitz agreed.

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck's radio program and received the same question. "Are you familiar with Skousen?" asked Beck.
When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. "He's fantastic," he said. "I
went back and I read 'The Naked Communist' and at the end of that
Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won't be able to find the
truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won't be
in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It's an idea I read
from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, 'The Naked Communist,'
and where he talked about someday the history of this country's going
to be lost because it's going to be hijacked by intellectuals and
communists and everything else. And I think we're there."

Beck
continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession
really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before
Obama's inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen
at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama
took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a "September
twelfth person."

"The first thing you could do," he said, "is get
'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get 'The 5,000
Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of
GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing:
Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all
about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will
help you understand American free enterprise � Make that dedication of
becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year."

By
then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired
demand. "We as a family," Paul Skousen told Salon, "were preparing to
publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request
that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just
that. That is the version we're now publishing.

In short the crazy Glenn Beck's inspiration comes from a crazy Mormon, W. Cleon Skousen.