BECK'S IDOL AND THE MYTHICAL ULTRACAPITALIST COMMIES

I've been telling you for some time that Beckites have a bizarre worldview in which elitists and fat cats are barely distinguishable from communists -- and now there's further evidence of that. Alexander Zaitchik of Salon has published an extremely valuable article about the late W. Cleon Skousen, a conspiratorialist crackpot whose booksGlenn Beck obsessively touts (Beck has written a new foreword to Skousen's book The 5,000 Year Leap, which he helped made a #1 Amazon bestseller this summer). Skousen wrote about "the New World Order," the glories of slavery, and the ever-threatening Red Menace -- and his take on the latter is just what I've been telling you about:

Skousen ... reemerged at the end of the [1960s] peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power....

In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian emigre who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Yikes.

Think it's just Beck who falls for this crap? Note that Mark Williams, the tea party leader who appeared on Anderson Cooper's CNN show Monday night to defend the movement, said this:

... this is nothing at all to do with health care, other than health care has become the metaphor for all the different socialist policies that are being rammed down our throats by this president, or that he's trying to ram down our throats.

It's about TARP. It's about taking money from the working stiffs and giving it to the big corporations. It's about the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C.

If Williams believes that the menace of Obamaism involves "socialist policies" and "the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C." simultaneously, then, somewhere in hell, Skousen is smiling.