Beck’s extremism: A conservative dilemma

last updated 8 January 2015

The conservative Becklash has begun, said David Corn in PoliticsDaily.com. When Glenn Beck, Fox News’s paranoid superstar, recently used his beloved chalkboard to show how Egyptian Islamists, American labor leaders, and “über-leftists’’ are conspiring to create global chaos and then install “a caliphate’’ across the world, even conservatives began to question his sanity. William Kristol, “the neocon top dog,” fired off a column saying that Beck had begun to sound like John Birch Society wackos. Other “sane conservatives’’ also turned on Beck last week after he compared Reform Judaism to “radicalized Islam.” As his ratings plummet, Beck’s “increasingly unhinged” diatribes are creating a real problem for Fox chairman Roger Ailes. Does Ailes really want conservatism’s TV flagship to serve as a soapbox for a barking-mad conspiracy nut?

I would hope not, said Peter Wehner in CommentaryMagazine.com. As a conservative, I find Beck “the most disturbing personality on cable television.’’ Every night, Beck—irate, belligerent, stalking around his set while wildly gesticulating—warns of the Apocalypse about to engulf America. “I can’t believe we’re finally here,’’ he said on a recent show, referring to the end-time. Beck’s rantings—in which President Obama is not just wrong, but the Antichrist—serve to confirm “the worst caricatures of the Right” as hysterical, paranoid demagogues. I’ve criticized Glenn Beck before, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com, and every time I’ve been deluged with e-mails from fellow conservatives calling me a traitor to the movement. But Beck “doesn’t represent the views of mainstream conservatives,” and we have a duty to say so.

Fine—but don’t limit yourselves to denouncing Beck, said Conor Friedersdorf in TheDailyBeast.com. Beck may be more colorful than some other conservative media stars, but he’s hardly alone in his race-baiting, or his portrayal of Obama as an evil Marxist Muslim intent on destroying the country. Rush Limbaugh, “the most popular voice in the conservative movement,’’ frequently attacks Obama in overtly racist language; he’s even accused him of creating a climate in which black kids can beat up white kids on the school bus. Lately, Limbaugh has been suggesting that Michelle Obama has a fat rear end. What about the conservative authors who publish best-sellers arguing that Obama is an anti-Western Kenyan who “embraces Islam’s sharia agenda?” If conservatives want to start holding their spokesmen to higher standards, great. But that would “require a radical change in how the Right conducts itself.”