Stateside,  Wingnuttery

Glenn Beck: the Jenna Delich* of the American Right

One of the hazards of being a conspiracy-minded rightwinger is that, if you’re not careful, you end up citing all kinds of dodgy sources– including racists and antisemites.

Glenn Beck is not careful.

Last June Beck promoted on his radio show a 1936 book entitled The Red Network: A “Who’s Who” and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, by Elizabeth Dilling.

This is a book, The Red Network. This came in from 1936. People — McCarthy was absolutely right. Now he may not — he may have used bad tactics or whatever, but he was absolutely right. This is a book — and I’m a getting a ton of these — from people who were doing what we’re doing now. We now are documenting who all of these people are. Well, there were Americans in the first 50 years of this nation that took this seriously, and they documented it. And this is from 1936, and in it, it talks about — it’s the who’s who and handbook for radicalism for patriots. This is “Who are the communists in America?” The overwhelming number of communists — labor unions. The other thing that they talked about was, in this book that I was reading last night, they said, you know, there’s this teachers union thing, but you really want to know who the real radical communists are? The NEA. That’s 1936. And they’re talking about this new organization that is really nasty, that you really have to look out for. The NEA. But everything this book has talked about they have mainstreamed.

As Mediamatters.org reported: “The Red Network is rife with racism, anti-Semitism, and religious bigotry.”

Among other things, Dilling insisted on being “fair” to Nazi Germany for its anti-Jewish activities, especially those aimed at “conspiring, revolutionary Communist Jews.”

She later became “a full-throated supporter of Nazism who reportedly attended Nazi party meetings in Germany and pro-Nazi rallies in the United States.”

Now we learn that on his TV show, as part of his continuing attacks on President Woodrow Wilson– who served from 1913 to 1921, but is still apparently the source of most of our current problems– Beck promoted the book Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins. (As president, Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve.)

Mullins, who died in February, was a notorious white supremacist, antisemite and anti-Zionist.

So how many more chances does Beck get from his friends and fans? If something like this happens another four or five times, even Sarah Palin may have to ditch him.

*On Jenna Delich, see here and here.