shrugged it off, asserting on his CNN broadcast the next night that Obama’s birth-certificate questions “won’t go away.” He featured a video clip of a town-hall attendee berating the Republican congressman Mike Castle of Delaware about Obama’s birth certificate: “He is not an American citizen! He is a citizen of Kenya!” Dobbs commented: “A lot of anger in the audience, and a lot of questions remaining—seemingly, the questions won’t go away because they haven’t been dealt with, it seems possible, too straightforwardly and quickly.”
The comments created an uproar. Chris Matthews, on MSNBC’s Hardball, suggested that Dobbs was “appeasing the nutcases” by reporting the claims as if they had any credibility. Rather than back down, Dobbs doubled down, going on CNN and charging that Obama could “make the whole … controversy disappear … by simply releasing his original birth certificate.” On his radio show he similarly persisted: “Where is that birth certificate? Why hasn’t it been forthcoming?”
When the resulting public firestorm produced calls from civil rights and Latino organizations to remove Dobbs from his anchor position, CNN’s president, Jon Klein, defended his coverage as “legitimate”—but he sent an email to Dobbs’s staff to inform them that the birth certificate story was “dead.” That night, Dobbs reiterated that Obama could “make the story go away.” As the controversy raged on other channels—Fox’s Bill O’Reilly knocked Dobbs for his credulousness, but defended him against his attackers anyway—Dobbs claimed that he really didn’t believe the theories: “All I said is the president is a citizen, but it would be simple to make all this noise go away with just simply producing the long-form birth certificate.” Dobbs eventually lost his job at CNN, in part over the Birther controversy.
But the conspiracist alternative universe kept expanding into the mainstream media. That was mainly due to a fresh new face at Fox News: Glenn Beck.
By 2009, Limbaugh was the elder statesman of the incendiary pundit set. Yet as divisive and conspiracist as his rhetoric often became, he was overtaken that year in both those qualities by the hot new face on the right-wing scene, the boyish-looking Beck. Beck built on and amplified the central themes established during the 2008 campaign —that Obama was a foreigner, a leftist, an America-hating radical who wanted to destroy the American way of life. In the process, he opened up a whole new frontier in the transmission of right-wing extremist ideas into mainstream American discourse.
Beck already had an established reputation as a bomb thrower, first from his years as a radio “shock jock” at a number of stations around the country, and then from his tenure, beginning in 2006, at CNN Headline News, where he was noted for such antics as asking newly elected Representative Keith Ellison, the nation’s first Muslim congressman, why he, Beck, shouldn’t consider him to be working for the enemy. He also was open in his sympathy for right-wing extremists and their ideas; while credulously interviewing a John Birch Society official about a possible conspiracy to create a North American Union, Beck said, “Sam, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, the John Birch Society, I thought they were a bunch of nuts. However, you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”
Beck announced he was making the leap to Fox News in October 2008, though his show did not begin running regularly until January 2009. Still, he gave the public a preview of where he was going with his new show in a mid-November appearance with Bill O’Reilly on The O’Reilly Factor, in which he ranted at length about the public’s evident tolerance—judging by election results—of a presidential candidate who had “palled around” with terrorists like William Ayers. Beck explained away the election as the result of “cakes and circuses and too many dumb people. I mean, we should thin out the herd, you know what I mean?” He also set the table for what was to come:
This is a total outrage, Bill. There is a disconnect in America. We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance, and I think we’re at a crossroads here. We’re still about here [points to spot on hand], where the roads are just starting to split, but pretty soon, this side and this side are not gonna understand each other at all, because we’re living in different universes.
It became clear early on that Beck was interested not in bridging this gap but in exploiting it. No sooner did his show, Glenn Beck, get started on Fox than he began focusing on the ideological aspects of Obama’s supposed radicalism. The show also featured an unusually maudlin tone; in his Fox debut on January 19, Beck became teary-eyed talking about Sarah Palin’s candidacy and how it made him feel like he “was not alone.” A few nights later he featured a segment in which he had the camera zoom in around his eyes as he delivered his monologue. When Stephen Colbert parodied it hilariously with a zoom camera operated by a proctologist, Beck came on and explained that he had done it because “we don’t look each other in the eyes” enough these days. A few weeks after this, in an hour-long program set up like a town-hall meeting, Beck again got choked up. “I just love my country—and I fear for it!” he blurted out.
Beck devoted most of his energy to the theme that President Obama was a far-left radical who intended to remake America into a totalitarian state. He had a problem, though, in figuring out just what kind of totalitarianism Obama was bringing: socialist, communist, or fascist. Over the course of the next several months, Beck began using all three terms to describe Obama’s agenda, often interchangeably—terms which by anyone’s lights but Beck’s actually represent profoundly different and distinct ideologies.
Beck’s show also featured an overarching apocalyptic sensibility. At various times, different dooms confronted the nation, according to Beck. He frequently fretted about the epidemic of violent crime by Mexican drug cartels south of the border, and hosted a hysterical discussion with the right-wing maven Michelle Malkin about the existential threat this posed to the United States. At other times he saw a global nuclear apocalypse looming in the form of a potential Middle East confrontation with Iran. But consistently the greatest threat to America was President Obama and his administration.
Soon Beck’s paranoia began reaching a fever pitch—he even flirted with the conspiracy theories that Obama was using the Federal Emergency Management Administration to secretly prepare concentration camps into which conservatives were about to be rounded up. Beck announced he was investigating claims: he told his audience that “we can’t disprove” the FEMA concentration camps story.
The FEMA camps claims dated back to the Militia of Montana and later gained traction under the auspices of Alex Jones’s radio rants. Patriot-movement leaders had been claiming since the 1990s that black helicopters had been spotted—their mission unclear but much speculated on; such stories were based purely on fabricated “evidence.” This, eventually, is what Glenn Beck reported back to his audience on his April 6, 2009, show, which featured a ten-minute segment with Jim Meigs, a Popular Science journalist, who looked into the claims and found them utterly spurious.
Beck was hardly chastened by the episode, and continued promoting beliefs held by militia groups in other arenas. On March 24 he had invited John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador, on his show for a discussion of the globalist propensities of the Obama White House. During the discussion Beck lurched off on his own tangent: “I mean, I think these guys—these guys, they’ll take away guns, they’ll take away our sovereignty, they’ll take away our, our, our currency, our money! They’re already starting to put all the global framework in with this bullcrap called global warming! This is an effort to globalize and tie together everybody on the planet, is it not?”
Taking away guns—that was one of the militias’ chief sources of paranoia in the 1990s, and now Beck was making the charge against Obama, too. Beck regularly warned his audience that “our rights are under attack,” including “the right to keep and bear arms” guaranteed by the Second Amendment.
The notion that Obama and his administration intended to go on a gun-grabbing spree became a recurring theme on Beck’s show. Twice he featured
