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

government is out to get him.
    “Even with all the resources of Fox, the truth still can’t be fully exposed without you. I ask you, please help us. Meet us here every day,” he urged his followers one evening in May 2009. Conspiratorially, he continued, warning about an unspecified “they” and “them”: “The status quo is what gives them their status. It is what brings them to power and self-importance. Use your voice while you still have it. I tell you, with everything in me, I think they are going to silence voices like mine and Bill O’Reilly and Rush and everybody else. They will silence us. They can’t let us continue to speak out. When the government is trying to influence what kind of syrup a restaurant uses, do you really think they’re going to have a problem regulating opinion?”
    It was a dark and sinister plot Beck was outlining. But if he truly believed this, he recovered fairly quickly. A moment later, he was telling viewers, “You know what? We’re going to do some comedy on the road.” He directed them to his Web site for ticket information.
    Months later, “they” weren’t merely trying to silence him. They were trying to kill him. One night in March 2010, Beck was on a familiar topic, the evils of “social justice,” when he argued that the Obama administration and its supporters had violated three of the Ten Commandments: stealing, coveting, and bearing false witness. “And for those of you in the administration who are coming after me on this one—I mean, remember, you’ve broken three, let’s not make it four. Thou shall not kill.”
    In late May 2010, Beck appeared on Fox Business Network to speak about a plot by the White House and its allies that involved “targeting and destroying” him. “Isolate and destroy. That is their whole mantra. They tried to do it with Rush. They tried to do it with Fox. They’re just coming after me. They have been relentless. This kind of stuff is coming after me for over a year.”
    The host, David Asman, was concerned. “Does it have any effect on you personally, emotionally?”
    “No,” Beck said, before reconsidering. “When you have your children in jeopardy, which my children have been in jeopardy, when your family is under attack, when you have the death threats, when you can’t go anywhere without major security, because of these groups and what they say and how they distort and how they lie, yes, it affects somebody personally. You bet it does.”
    But brave Beck said he would press on—“until my dying breath.”
    The problem is, “they” are interested in killing more than just Glenn Beck. “They are building a machine that will crush the entrepreneurial spirit and the freedom that our Founding Fathers designed,” Beck warned another day. “This machine, whatever it is they are building, will crush it. Do not let them build another piece. So while I turn away, I want to make sure that I have at least ten million eyes watching—watching every single move they’re making.”
    “They,” Beck said at another point, “will gather strength and you will not be able to stand against them … They’re going inside our government … These people are thugs … I fear that there will come a time when I cannot say things that I am currently saying.”
    Beck frequently advises his viewers to fear home invasions. Sometimes these invasions come in the form of parenting advice. “You will have to shoot me in the forehead before I will let you into my house to tell me how to raise my children.” Sometimes they are to disarm the population: “You will have to shoot me in the forehead before you take away my gun.” Sometimes they are to silence dissent: “You will have to shoot me in the forehead before I acquiesce and be silent.”
    Even something as simple as a census questionnaire leads to a home invasion. Beck, refusing to fill out his census form completely, warned those census workers who might come to his door in