Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank

ahead of his time. And our founders were thousands of years ahead of their time. My hope is that all Americans young and old will spend the time with this book to understand why we are who we are. The words of our Founding Fathers have a way of reaching across any political divide. They are words of wisdom that I can only describe as divinely inspired.’ ”
    Beck pitched the book in his radio and TV shows. His promotion of The 5,000 Year Leap pushed the book, after three decades in obscurity, to number one in the Amazon.com rankings. Few could have known much about the author of the book they were all buying.
    Skousen, an ally of the far-right John Birch Society, had been a cold-war communist hunter. He regarded The Manchurian Candidate not as a fictional movie but as a documentary. A Brigham Young University professor, he reacted to pressure on the Mormon Church to ordain blacks as priests by declaring that communists were attacking the Mormons.
    Eventually, the head of the Mormon Church issued an edict to churches to “avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said” by Skousen’s movement. But Skousen’s movement (it changed its name from the Freemen Institute to the National Center for Constitutional Studies after militia groups began to use the “freemen” label) persisted. Skousen, claiming to represent the beliefs of the Founding Fathers, called for the abolition of Social Security, farm subsidies, and education and welfare funding; pulling out of the United Nations; and eliminating federal income taxes and most federal regulatory agencies.
    Skousen’s ideas might have died with him, but all that changed when Beck turned The 5,000 Year Leap into his manifesto.
    Skousen, at the start of the book, includes a diagram of the political spectrum stretching from “anarchy” to “tyranny.” Beck draws the very same diagram on his chalkboard, though he substitutes “total government” for “tyranny.”
    “Measuring people and issues in terms of political parties has turned out to be philosophically fallacious,” Skousen wrote. “Communism and Fascism turned out to be different names for approximately the same thing—the police state.” Skousen argued that “the American founders considered the two extremes to be ANARCHY on the one hand, and TYRANNY on the other.” He wrote that the original Articles of Confederation were “too close to anarchy.”
    Compare this to Beck, using the Skousen diagram on his chalkboard: “Fascism and communism are the same,” he said in March 2010. “It’s total anarchy that is on this end. Here’s the republic, here’s a progressive government that leads you to either fascism or communism.” Another night, Beck gestures to the “tyranny” end of the drawing: “This here is fascism, communism, statism. This is total complete control by the government.” He gestures to the other side. “This is anarchy here.” He tells viewers that the “Articles of Confederation … was as close to this line to anarchy as we could possibly get.”
    Alas, Skousen’s—and therefore Beck’s—view of the Founders’ intent is a bit creative. Skousen’s book, for example, has a section titled “The Founders Warn Against the Drift Toward the Collectivist Left.” As evidence of this warning, he uses a quote from Jefferson: “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”
    But Skousen neglects to mention that the quote was part of an argument Jefferson was having with his rivals in the Federalist Party. They, too, were Founders, and they argued the other side: that government should be stronger. Then, as now, the proper size of government was fiercely debated.
    Likewise, Skousen supplies a quotation from Benjamin Franklin “emphasizing the importance of marriage as he attempted to dissuade a young friend from taking a mistress.” He quotes Franklin: “Marriage is the