[Updated on June 3rd]

Glenn Beck is unique. He is not quite your run-of-the-mill Republican commentator. While most Fox News conservative hacks typically talk about the same material, Beck often stays away from the Republican echo chamber and even refrains from typical Birther talk. If G. Gordon Liddy in the Joker, and Rush Limbaugh is the Penguin, and Sean Hannity is Two-Face, and Ann Coulter is Cat Woman, then Glenn Beck would have to be the Riddler. His chalk boards of insanity can lead one to believe he’s following tons of clues left behind by puppet-masters for quiz masters like himself to decode, though what he’s really doing is trying to fuse political activism with entertainment by creating never-ending acronyms. Beck, more than any of the others, is the Official Conspiracy Theorist of the Right, taking blantantly untrue facts about the past and twisting them to make illogical explanations for the present.

As David Frum, a Conservative blogger and former Bush speechwriter, wrote in the New York Times:

“Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon. Every day, Beck offers alternative knowledge — an alternative history of the United States and the world, an alternative system of economics, an alternative reality. As corporate profits soar, the closed information system insists that the free-enterprise system is under assault. As prices slump, we are warned of imminent hyperinflation. As black Americans are crushed under Depression-level unemployment, the administration’s policies are condemned by some conservatives as an outburst of Kenyan racial revenge against the white overlord.”

The life of Glenn Beck is a long one filled with many episodes, each one terrible in its own right. Only by compacting it into one 34-year time line can we appreciate how horrible it all is:

A Glenn Beck Timeline

1977: Glenn Beck’s parents divorce due to his mother’s drug addictions and fits of depression. Soon afterwards, Beck wins a contest at age 13 to be a DJ for an hour. Before long, he was working three jobs at three radio stations — and within a year, he was fired from all three. He was 14.

1979: Alexander Zaitchik writes:

“Early one morning in May 1979, a 41-year-old divorcee named Mary Beck went boating in Washington’s Puget Sound. Her companions on the expedition were a retired papermaker named Orean Carrol, whose boat she helped launch near the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup, and Carrol’s pet dog. Exactly what happened next remains shrouded in morning mist, but among the crew, only the dog would survive the day. The boat was recovered late that afternoon adrift near Vashon Island, just north of Tacoma. It was empty but for two wallets and the frightened animal. Mary Beck’s body was discovered floating fully clothed nearby. Carrol’s corpse washed ashore at the Vashon ferry terminal the following morning.

The county coroner found no evidence of violence on either body. Police investigators told Tacoma’s News Tribune that the double drowning appeared to be a classic man-overboard mishap — a failed rescue attempt in which both parties perished….

Since launching his talk radio career in the late ’90s, Beck has constructed a persona anchored in a biography of struggle and redemption…. Over the course of many retellings, the tragedy of Mary Beck would become the cornerstone event in her son’s personal narrative of redemption, and that tale of rebirth would became the cornerstone of his career. But the story Glenn Beck often tells about his mother is not quite the one recorded by the Tacoma paper. As Beck would later relate to millions of his listeners, his mother’s drowning was no boating accident. It was a suicide, he claimed, explained in a short note written on that fateful dawn and left on the mantel. And he said it happened in 1977, when he was 13, not 1979, when he was 15 (even though newspaper obits and government records confirm that a 41-year-old woman named Mary Beck died in Puyallup in 1979.) In fact, Beck’s first wife had never heard of Mary Beck’s alleged suicide until years after they married, when she heard her husband discussing it live on the radio.”

What’s even more surprising is that Beck continues to refer to “the suicide of his mother when he was just thirteen…” on his website.

1982: Beck begins smoking pot every day, starting at age 16. Beck takes a job at K 96, a small adult-contemporary station in Provo, Utah, just south of Salt Lake City. Looking back on the first day, Beck writes, “I pulled out a cigarette and everybody said, ‘Oh … I thought you were Mormon. And I said, ‘Oh … I thought you were normal.'” Beck openly called his Mormon colleagues “freaks,” quickly souring relationships with everyone around him. Due to the era of deregulation, the FCC began removing constraints on radio ownership across a range of areas, from public-service content quotas to filing requirements, including an “anti-trafficking” rule that barred investors from quick flipping stations for profit. The result was a radio bubble fueled by a newly feverish market for properties. Between 1982 and 1990, almost half of the country’s stations would change hands at least once. Salaries boom and DJs begin a feverish war for ratings.

February 1983: Beck takes job at WGPC. Colleage Dave Fox remembers: “He never talked politics back then. He even used to chide Theismann for his political rants, telling him, ‘Well, don’t sugarcoat it, Joe.'” There he meets his future wife Claire and fellow DJ Bruce Kelley, who would pass joints with him during the night shift in the office of the station president, a strict Mormon. Beck begins using cocaine. Kelly gives him his first lessons in marketing and publicity, and one day saves his life. When Beck slipped while playing ball and swallowed his tongue, Kelly pulled it out from his throat.

Late 1983: Jim Sumpter, became vice-president of the Malkan radio chain in Texas, lures Beck southwest with the promise of his own morning show, the Morning Zoo, at Corpus Christi’s KZFM, the city’s leading Top 40 station, where Beck fights his first ratings war. In a promotional war with KITE, the Zoo Team begin calling themselves the “KITE Killers” and began attending promotional events dressed in Army surplus camo fatigues and berets. “They’d roll up to promotional gigs and jump out of the limo in uniform, waving plastic machine guns,” remembers Barry Kaye, a programmer at the station. Many of the audio and visual tropes Beck employs today — the Muppet voices, the outrageous statements, the props, the stunts, the fawning and giggling supporting cast — can be traced to the zoo and post-zoo radio culture that sustained him professionally for years. At 19, Beck’s talents are admired by his cast members, and he talks about making it big in New York. Church Dunaway, a KITE staffer, recalls early in his tenure showing up to the KITE studio and finding each of the station’s front doors — the only exit in a converted storefront building — glued shut. A demolition crew had to knock the front door down so that the “KITE Killers” could get inside in time to start their show. Then there were other pranks that posed less of a fire hazard. Throughout 1983, Dunaway and his staff were anonymously placed on dozens of mailing lists for magazines and books delivered cash-on-delivery. The soundtrack for it all was a Beck-written “Ghostbusters” spoof that became a local hit during Beck’s morning show, called “KITE-busters.”

1985: Seeing Beck’s appeal to younger listeners, Louisville, Kentucky’s WRKA hires Beck on a $70,000 salary, making him the largest investment in the station’s makeover. As a signing bonus, Beck received a gold Rolex. Beck makes frequent fat jokes about Liz Curtis, an afternoon advice show host for a local AM radio show Beck wasn’t competing in ratings with. He often employed Godzilla sound effects and several days before her wedding, Beck employed a skit where a spy told him that, “The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn.” As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis’ named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck’s small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings — “a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck,” remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. “Beck told me, ‘Sorry, all’s fair in love and war,'” remembers Meiners. “He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful.”

April 15, 1986: Ronald Reagan orders U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi’s Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck, sounding stoned, opens the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” then plays patriotic music and a New Wave-ish spoof titled “Qaddafi Sucks.” Dozens of callers applaud him for “standing up for America.” When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. “I personally don’t think we did enough,” he says. “We should’ve went over [sic] there and bombed the hell out of ’em.” When a young male caller suggests kidnapping Libyan agents and then torturing them by sliding them down razor blades into waiting pools of alcohol, Beck simply replies, “Thanks for the call. Buh-bye.”

Early 1987: Zaitchik writes:

“Beck’s signature mix of Gadhafi songs, fat jokes and racial impersonations had made waves, but failed to produce numbers. With Beck at the helm during morning drive, WRKA slipped to third in the market. He was fired and the station brought its youth experiment to an end.” WRKA switches to an oldies format. Looking back, Beck says he was drinking heavily, using cocaine and contemplating suicide. “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it,” Beck later wrote. “Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I’m only alive today because (a) I’m too cowardly to kill myself … and (b) I’m too stupid.”

1987: Zaitchik writes:

“Beck was hired once again as a strategic youth injection. This time the channel in need of fresh energy was the Phoenix Top 40 powerhouse KOY FM, known as Y95. The station brought in Beck to fill the morning shoes of a middle-aged DJ named Bill Heywood, whose mellow persona and long career made him a Phoenix institution, but one out of step with the times. Heywood may have interviewed everyone from JFK to Sinatra, but he lacked the zany chops needed to keep up with Beck’s old friend from D.C. Bruce Kelly, then hosting the market’s leading morning show on rival station KZZP. As ever, Kelly was a flamboyant master of publicity stunts as well as a top-rated morning jock. Since parting ways with Beck in D.C., he had completed the Boston Marathon on a custom pogo stick and convinced John McCain to dive into a pool of chocolate. To compete with Kelly, Y95 needed someone who could make a lot of noise. Beck was their man.

At first, Kelly was happy to have his old friend in the same town. “My wife and I were excited when Glenn and Claire told us they were moving to Phoenix,” says Kelly. But these warm feelings didn’t last long. Something had changed in Beck. In Phoenix, Beck became known for an outsize and mischievous ego — a reputation that would dog him for the rest of his Top 40 career. This new Beck was symbolized by the cars that stocked the garage of his Phoenix ranch house: a navy blue Cadillac, and that symbol of ’80s excess, a DeLorean.

The station partnered Beck with a 26-year-old Arizona native named Tim Hattrick. More relaxed by nature than Beck, Hattrick expected that the two would share duties on the show as partners. But Beck had other ideas. His first day in the studio, Beck called Hattrick into his office and laid down the law. “I remember Beck sat me down and pulled out a notepad on which he had drawn a planet being orbited by satellites,” says Hattrick. “On the big planet, Glenn wrote ‘Me.’ Then he pointed to the orbiting satellites and wrote names on them, such as ‘Tim,’ ‘News,’ and ‘Clydie Clyde.’ I’ll never forget Beck telling me I was a satellite. He was younger than me but carried himself like he was 35 or 40.”

Dispelling any doubts about the station’s new direction, Y95 also rented a mascot monkey, named Zippy the Chimp. Station managers flew Beck and Hattrick to New York, where they watched Scott Shannon run his zoo at Z100. Back in Phoenix, the Beck-Hattrick show was announced in a local TV ad that marks the 23-year-old Beck’s television debut. In the 30-second spot, Beck appears puffy-faced in a brown leather jacket. Next to him is the slimmer Hattrick in a satin Phoenix Suns warmer. The two young DJs are sitting in the studio stirring each other’s coffee when an announcer’s voice declares: “The new Y95 morning zookeepers — Glenn Beck and Tim Hattrick!”

Beck: “We told our bosses right upfront, ‘We don’t need gimmicks to sell the new Y95.”

Hattrick: “We’ve got a better mix of music, great DJs who don’t yak too much — ”

Beck: “Plenty of easy contests for you to win lots of free money — ”

Hattrick: “Plus more continuous music, Y95 Airborne traffic report, and special guests!”

Beck: “With all that, who needs gimmicks?”

As Beck delivers this last line, balloons and cash fall from the ceiling, model airplanes zip by, and a loud cuckoo clock goes off, sight unseen. Zippy the Chimp jumps onto the table wearing a yellow “Y Morning Zoo” T-shirt. The ad summarizes in 30 seconds most of what you need to know about the first 15 years of Beck’s radio career.

Beck never grew close to Hattrick, who thought his new partner was talented but full of himself and incapable of thinking of anything but radio and ratings. “Beck lived, ate, drank and breathed radio,” says Hattrick, who still works as a DJ in Phoenix. “It was impossible to talk to him about anything without reference to how to bring it into the show. I never once saw any evidence that he could turn it off. In that sense he was a one-dimensional person. But he was great at being a grandstanding, pompous idiot and shaking the brushes for attention.”

Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly’s market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. “I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning,” remembers Kelly. “When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks — everything. But I refused to mention Beck’s name on the air, which drove him nuts.”

Beck kept trying. When KZZP’s music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95’s two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. “Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him,” says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.

“Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks,” says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP’s program director. “It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention.”

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” for Halloween — a recurring motif in Beck’s life and career — Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. “A couple days after Kelly’s wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, ‘We hear you had a miscarriage,’ ” remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. “When Terry said, ‘Yes,’ Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can’t do anything right — about he can’t even have a baby.”

“It was low class,” says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. “There are certain places you just don’t go.”

“Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station,” says Kelly. “It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us ‘Jackass.'” Among those who were appalled by Beck’s prank call was Beck’s own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly’s wife since the two worked together at WPGC.

Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition’s begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.

Toward the end of Beck’s time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck’s rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert’s glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP’s Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck’s voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium’s sound system: “The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!” As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing “Y95 Zoo” T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.

“It was brilliant,” remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. “Totally brilliant. He nailed us.””

Winter 1987: Budget problems cause the mayor of Downtown Phoenix to ask Y95 to lead a fund-raising effort for holiday decorations. Beck and Hattrick come up with this idea to “steal” decorations from the City of Scottsdale. Both are arrested. “It didn’t quite go as planned, but it resulted in a lot of news coverage and contributed to a successful fundraiser,” says Mike Horne, the station’s general manager.

September 1988: Beck and Hattrick invited Jessica Hahn, who had an affair with teleavngelist Jim Bakker and was the recent Playmate of the Month. “That evening, we took Jessica out to dinner,” remembers Mike Horne. “I got up to go to the men’s room and quickly found myself surrounded at the urinal by Glenn and Tim, who began lobbying me to hire Jessica as a permanent fixture of the morning show. They negotiated the deal for an apartment, a rental car, and $2,000 a month.”

Zaitchik writes:

“One is reminded of P.T. Barnum’s famous arrangement with his longtime prize midget, Tom Thumb, who received $4 a week plus board. And indeed Beck’s showman instincts were worthy of Barnum: The hiring of Hahn as the zoo team’s “prize-and-weather bunny” became an international story. Johnny Carson and David Letterman joked about it, editorial writers debated it, and as a result Y95 received a much-needed ratings jolt. When People magazine visited the station looking for a quote, Beck described Hahn’s radio debut as “awesome” and explained that she filled the void of a “prize bunny for our zoo.” The trio was short-lived, however. After a few weeks on the job, Hahn asked to be transferred to a nighttime slot.”

Toward the end of his time in Phoenix, Beck’s wife, Claire, gave birth to a daughter. As with the rest of his life, Beck had incorporated his wife’s pregnancy into his radio show. He asked listeners to guess when his wife would go into labor and the sex of the child. When Beck came back on the air after the birth, he announced that the delivery had been problematic and that there would be no more games around the subject. The baby girl had suffered from a series of strokes at birth resulting in cerebral palsy. Beck named her Mary, after his mother.

“After the public buildup about the baby, it was all very awkward and sad,” remembers Hattrick. “I thought it was a good lesson in being careful about personal issues on the air.”

Early 1989: Beck accepts another Top 40 radio jockey job in Houston to compete against nationally syndicated zoo superstar John Lander, without a supporting cast, at a salary said to be around $300,000, reflecting “something like the morning radio equivalent of a kamikaze mission,” says Zaitchik.

His conversations with the Muppet-voiced creature were so seamless and regular that listeners showed up at promotional events asking to meet the character. “People would arrive and ask, ‘Where’s Clyde?'” remembers Mark Schecterle, KRBE’s marketing director. “We’d always tell them Clyde just left the building, but would be at the next event. Beck was a creative, totally nonpolitical disc jockey back then.”

“It was the worst time in my broadcasting career, and I wish people would stop bringing it up,” Beck told the Houston Chronicle. “It’s the most embarrassing thing I ever did on radio. If I could make everybody forget about my time in Houston, it would be good.”

“Glenn took risks and was able to generate talk, but he never took off in ratings,” says Wheeler, Beck’s program director. “The thinking at the time was Glenn was misplaced as a Top 40 morning host. He was not very hip and tended to sway in content toward things that might appeal to an older or non-music listener.”

“Radio is about numbers, and Beck didn’t produce them,” says Schecterle, Beck’s KRBE colleague. “So they fired him.” It was not an amicable split. Beck had been working under a multiyear contract and fought hard for the maximum severance. “He spent his last weeks in Houston battling on the payout with the corporate programmer,” says Wheeler. The battle was so drawn out it caught the attention of potential employers in the clubby world of Top 40 radio. According to a veteran morning radio hand, word spread that Beck was hard to work with and prone to wild behavioral swings. In industry terms, he had become “damaged goods.” He was still only 26.

1990: Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city’s leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104 and is paired with Pat Gray, who would also go on into conservative talk radio and then work with him on Beck’s radio show. Beck announces on his show that he was going to train the world’s first bank-tube astronaut, and made “Gerry the Gerbil” a little cape. Each development was accompanied by a press release. When all the pieces were in place, Beck and Gray visited a local bank and sent the animal to a teller with a known fear of rodents. “The build-up was amazing, masterful,” says a former director at the station. “PETA was flipping out, picketing the station every day. Beck’s on the local news. He took a stupid stunt and turned it into weeks of compelling high-publicity radio. He always knew how to get attention, how to get people talking about him.”

They also run a promotional campaign for the fictional grand opening of the world’s first air-conditioned underground amusement park, called Magicland. “They never told a soul what they were doing,” says Sean Hall, the B104 newsreader. “I didn’t know until the morning it aired. People just drove around in circles on the beltway for hours trying to find the place. And that was exactly what it was supposed to elicit.”

Zaitchik writes:

“Beck was known at B104 as a pro’s pro in the studio but was becoming increasingly unraveled when not working. “Beck used to get hammered after every show at this little bar-café down the street,” remembers a music programmer who worked with Beck. “At first we thought he was going to get lunch.” The extent to which Beck was struggling to keep it together is highlighted by Beck’s arrest one afternoon just outside Baltimore. He was speeding in his DeLorean with one of the car’s gull-wing doors wide open when the cops pulled him over. According to a former colleague, Beck was “completely out of it” when a B104 manager went down to the station to bail him out. In his 2003 book, “Real America,” Beck refers to himself as a borderline schizophrenic. Whether that statement is matter-of-fact or intended for effect, he has spoken more than once about taking drugs for ADHD, and when he was at B104, Beck’s coworkers believed him to be taking prescription medication for some kind of mental or psychological ills. “He used to complain that his medication made him feel like he was ‘under wet blankets,'” remembers the former music programmer.

Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn’t just fire people in fits of rage — he fired them slowly and publicly. “He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies,” remembers a colleague.””

1991: First Gray then Beck is fired for not pulling in the ratings

Early 1992: The Glenn and Pat Show found second life further down the radio food chain at the New Haven Top 40 station KC101. They arrive at a dumpy little studio building at the New Haven and began spending up to 8 hours prepping for every show.

Late 1992: KC101 was purchased by Clear Channel. Beck is drinking and mixing recreational and prescription drugs, making him erratic and moody. “When Beck was not taking certain drugs he was supposed to be taking he could act very bizarre,” remembers Kelly Nash, who managed Beck in New Haven. “He didn’t want anyone questioning his authority. I remember he fired our consultant and brought in his old friend Jim Sumpter. The two of them created and launched an in-house research project that made absolutely no sense. When I confronted him on the absurdity of his approach, he said, ‘This is above your head.’ Then he locked the door to his office. I thought, ‘This guy is out of control. He’s insane.'”

1994: Zaitchik writes:

“Everywhere Beck turned, things were falling apart. His marriage was failing. Pat Gray, his best friend and creative partner, was sick of Beck’s drama, and about to move his family to Salt Lake City. (He would later describe the station under Beck as “a pretty cancerous place to be.”) Beck saw his daughters only through a pot haze and in-between blackouts. Twisting the multiple knives in Beck’s gut was the regular humiliation of Top 40 promotional stunts. In a typical KC101 event, Beck dressed up as a banana and dove into a pool full of Styrofoam.

Whatever humiliations he suffered, Orson Welles never dressed up as a banana.”

Beck’s wife leaves him that year.

November 1994: Beck imagines shooting himself to the music of the recently deceased fellow Washingtonian Kurt Cobain, but instead attends his first AA meeting, stops drinking and smoking pot, and chops off his pony tail.

Early 1995: Beck begins a spiritual quest and goes to different churches and bookstores and reads from Alan Dershowitz, Pope John Paul II, Adolf Hitler, Billy Graham, Carl Sagan, and Friedrich Nietzsche. His friend and former partner Pat Gray try to convince him to become a Mormon but Beck rejected Gray’s overtures, teasingly calling him “freak boy.”

Fall 1996: Beck and Gray start commenting on local Connecticut politics, attacking the liberal Lowell Weicker, who had left the Republican Party after losing his Senate seat, endearing them to Joe Lieberman. Lieberman in turn helps Beck enroll part-time at Yale. He took one class, “Early Christology,” and dropped out.

1997: Beck partners with a local music columnist named Vinnie Penn. “When I showed up in ’97 Beck was in a sort of wasteland, looking for a partner,” says Penn. Beck talks about syndicating the show. “Beck saw the syndication trend coming a mile away, I gotta give it to him,” says Penn. “But he came to realize that talk was the easier route for him and the better fit. When I got there he was already wondering how he was going to sustain a career in Top 40 radio when his heart wasn’t in it. He was like, ‘Where am I headed?’ At one point I remember him talking about joining the ministry.”

Beck increasingly brings politics into the show and Penn is told to try and reign him in as much as possible. “He always knew how to work people and situations for attention,” says Penn. “He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point — pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He’s built his empire on very calculated button pushing.”

“Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it,” writes Zaitchik.

“Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of shit,” says one of Beck’s former coworkers in New Haven. “The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I’m like, ‘But you fucking hated him!'”

Early 1998: After getting into too many political arguments with callers, Beck was given a weekday talk show on one of Clear Channel’s AM stations in exchange for returning to bubble-gum-flavored Top 40 morning radio. At first, the double-radio career strategy worked, but then “he surprised colleagues by linking up with talk radio super-agent George Hiltzik, a Democrat and a heavy hitter with New York’s N.S. Bienstock agency who also repped Matt Drudge. (And whose son, Matt, now handles P.R. for Beck.)”

August 22, 1998: Beck’s first test in real-time topical talk radio comes with his second show on WABC. The broadcast airs two days after the U.S. launched cruise missiles at suspected terrorist facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan.

Zaitchik writes:

“A story about the missile attacks catches Beck’s attention. He stops to read the dispatch about the terrorist organization targeted by the recent missile strikes. Obviously encountering it for the first time, Beck attempts and fails to pronounce “Osama bin Laden.” Embarrassed, he launches into a kind of loopy scat:

‘A paper in Pakistan received a letter from the spokesperson from, uh … Asma … Asma Bin-Lay-deen? Is that his name? Bin Lay-deen? Bin Jelly Bean Green Bean? Mr. Clean? I love him. He’s hot. He says he’s ready for war with the U.S. Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Baked Bean. Loosen the turban! Mr. Clean, Dig-my-scene. Oh, yes! Look at the latrine …’

That settled, Beck introduces himself to his listeners. “I don’t really consider myself a conservative,” he says, echoing Bob Grant’s self-description almost word for word. “I know I don’t consider myself a liberal. I have a brain and I like to use it sometimes.”

With that, Beck is ready to take some calls.

Someone says, “The only message these people in the Middle East get is brute force.” Beck agrees, likening that summer’s African embassy attacks to Pearl Harbor.

Another caller says he doubts Clinton would launch strikes just to deflect attention from the Lewinsky scandal, considering that action might cost lives. This confuses Beck, who asks, “Lives? We used cruise missiles.” It doesn’t occur to Beck that the caller is referring to the Sudanese working inside the medicine factory destroyed by U.S. missiles.

The next caller supports the military action, adding that he “respects Jews, Catholics and Muslims — everybody the same.” To which Beck responds, “I can’t go with you that far, Alan, but thanks for calling.”

The next caller thinks America needs to “take the fight to the enemy.” Beck agrees. “War has changed, it’s the way we have to fight it.” To drive home the point that “war has changed” and that America has entered a new and dangerous period in its history, Beck then segues to a commercial break with the chorus to “Danger Zone,” the 1986 Kenny Loggins hit and “Top Gun” theme song. Further proving you can take the man out of the 1980s, but not the 1980s out of the man, Beck returns from the break with Toto’s “Hold the Line.”

Back on air, Beck dives back into the subject of dastardly peace protestors. He raises what would become one of his favorite subjects in the coming years: the lessons of Vietnam. “The problem with Vietnam is we didn’t fight to win,” explains Beck. “When you declare a war, there are no rules. Have you learned the lesson of Vietnam that we can’t fight it half-assed? We need to fight it to the last body.”

Beck then goes for the emotional jugular for the first time. The move comes in the form of a story about an unnamed “friend” of Beck’s. This friend returned from Vietnam only to endure the abuse of protesting peaceniks. “He got off the plane from Vietnam and a woman spat in his face and called him ‘baby killer,'” explains Beck. “Then he left his medal of honor in a trash can.”

Whether Beck was aware that he was quoting almost verbatim from Sylvester Stallone’s closing monologue in “First Blood,” it is impossible to say. But whatever its source, the story is dubious. As documented by Jerry Lembcke in his book “The Spitting Image,” stories of Vietnam vets being spit upon didn’t gain currency until the 1980s. So many of those stories dissolved upon closer inspection that even after serious research efforts, not a single case of a Vietnam veteran being spat upon has ever been documented.

Beck’s story about his veteran buddy sounds so pat that even his conservative listeners have to wonder. Within minutes, a caller asks, “About your friend who threw away his medal — did that really happen?” Beck mutters, “Yes, but he regrets it now,” then changes the subject.

A few minutes later, toward the end of the first hour, Beck shifts gears. After expounding on war and peace with the certainty of someone who has spent a life thinking about these things — and not imitating Muppets between Bon Jovi songs — he swivels into a disarming Socratic stance of admitted ignorance. It is a move that would play a large role in his future appeal: the average guy who tells you the way it is, then shrugs innocently and says, “But what do I know?” The transition is obviously unpracticed, and it jars, but for the first time in the show, Beck’s words ring true.

“I don’t have a stinking answer to save my life,” he admits. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Late 1998: Kelly Nash called Beck into his office and informed him that his contract would not be renewed.

Late 1998: After divorcing his first wife, Beck begins dating Tania.

December 1998: Beck has a fallout with Lieberman over his refusal to back the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

1999: Beck marries Tania and they go on a church tour, looking for a faith, they settled on Mormonism, partly at the urging of his daughter Mary. After they went looking for a faith on a church tour together, they joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Beck later explains why he became Mormon: “I apologize, but guys will understand this. My wife is, like, hot, and she wouldn’t have sex with me until we got married. And she wouldn’t marry me unless we had a religion.” Tania replies, “He’s not joking.”

October 1999: Beck baptized by his old friend, and current-day co-worker Pat Gray. Beck and his current wife have had two children together, Raphe (who is adopted) and Cheyenne.

Late 1999: Beck takes job at WFLA, Tampa Bay’s leading news-talk station, though torn over the possibility of leaving his young daughters back in Connecticut with his ex-wife Claire.

September 11, 2001: Within one year of doing his first talk show in afternoon drive at WFLA, Beck dominated the ratings, giving the station its first #1 program ever. Due to the overwhelming demand for live, news oriented programming after September 11, Beck was offered a jump start on national syndication. This resulted in early affiliations with stations such as KPRC/Houston, WGST/Atlanta, WSPD/Toledo, Ohio and WOAI/San Antonio.

January 2002: Premiere Radio Networks launched the show on 47 stations. The show was then moved to “The Big Talker 1210” WPHT in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2003: “Glenn Beck’s Rally for America” is held in support of the troops fighting the war in Iraq, drawing 25,000 people. While generally attended by war supporters, Beck spoke of many who “disagreed with the war, but still supported the troops”. He ran the final rally at Marshall University over the Memorial Day weekend.

May 17, 2005: “I’m thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I’m wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it…. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out. Is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus — band — Do, and I’ve lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I’d kill Michael Moore,’ and then I’d see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I’d realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn’t kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn’t choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I’m not sure.”

Sept. 9, 2005: “Yesterday, when I saw the ATM cards being handed out, the $2,000 ATM cards, and they were being handed out at the Astrodome. And they actually had to close the Astrodome and seal it off for a while because there was a near-riot trying to get to these ATM cards. My first thought was, it’s not like they’re going to run out of the $2,000 ATM cards. You can wait!…

“When you are rioting for these tickets, or these ATM cards, the second thing that came to mind was — and this is horrible to say, and I wonder if I’m alone in this — you know it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims’ families? Took me about a year. And I had such compassion for them, and I really wanted to help them, and I was behind, you know, “Let’s give them money, let’s get this started.” All of this stuff. And I really didn’t — of the 3,000 victims’ families, I don’t hate all of them. Probably about 10 of them. And when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, “Oh shut up!” I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining. And we did our best for them. And, again, it’s only about 10.

“But the second thought I had when I saw these people and they had to shut down the Astrodome and lock it down, I thought: I didn’t think I could hate victims faster than the 9-11 victims. These guys — you know it’s really sad. We’re not hearing anything about Mississippi. We’re not hearing anything about Alabama. We’re hearing about the victims in New Orleans. This is a 90,000-square-mile disaster site, New Orleans is 181 square miles. A hundred and — 0.2 percent of the disaster area is New Orleans! And that’s all we’re hearing about, are the people in New Orleans. Those are the only ones we’re seeing on television are the scumbags — and again, it’s not all the people in New Orleans. Most of the people in New Orleans got out! It’s just a small percentage of those who were left in New Orleans, or who decided to stay in New Orleans, and they’re getting all the attention. It’s exactly like the 9-11 victims’ families. There’s about 10 of them that are spoiling it for everybody.”

Late 2005: Glenn Beck’s show is heard on more than 200 stations, and is the 3rd highest-rated national radio talk show among adults ages 25 to 54 according to Premiere Research/Arbitron.

January 17, 2006: CNN Headline News hires Beck to host a topical news show. “Having tired of the predictable left-versus-right debates in cable news, I am eager to offer a different take for Headline News viewers,” Beck said in a statement. “I hope that people will come away from our show not only informed, but also entertained, in a way they’re not used to seeing on cable news.”

November 6, 2006: “You know, we all have our inner demons. I, for one – I can’t speak for you, but I’m on the verge of moral collapse at any time. It can happen by the end of the show.”

November 14, 2006: “I have been nervous about this interview with you because what I feel like saying is, ‘Sir, prove to me that you are not working with our enemies. … And I know you’re not. I’m not accusing you of being an enemy, but that’s the way I feel, and I think a lot of Americans will feel that way.” –Beck interviewing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), the first Muslim U.S. congressman.

May 1, 2007: “Al Gore’s not going to be rounding up Jews and exterminating them. It is the same tactic, however. The goal is different. The goal is globalization…And you must silence all dissenting voices. That’s what Hitler did. That’s what Al Gore, the U.N., and everybody on the global warming bandwagon [are doing].”

October 22, 2007: Beck on the the California forest fires: “I think there is a handful of people who hate America. Unfortunately for them, a lot of them are losing their homes in a forest fire today.”

January 4, 2008: Following surgery on his ass, a video is released of Beck rambling about the terrible the doctors (and the health care system) was and how he was contemplating suicide.

February 14, 2008: “Ugly people, if you’re a guy, you can get past it. I don’t think you can as an ugly woman…. if you’re an ugly woman, you’re probably a progressive as well.”

May 3, 2008: After Gloria Steinem suggested John McCain would be treated differently if he were a woman, Beck exclaimed: “You self-centered, self-righteous, socialist, out-of-control, dangerous, man-hating bitch. Shut your mouth. We might have bought into this crap in the 1960s because too many people were doing LSD. We’re not on LSD anymore. You need to start making sense.”

June 30, 2008: “The storm is finally coming ashore.”

July 15, 2008: “We’re in the perfect storm.”

October 16, 2008: Fox News hires Glenn Beck away from CNN. Beck moves away from producing entertaining videos for a young demographic and begins wearing thick, black-rimmed grandpa glasses and preaching towards an older audience.

December 8, 2008: Glenn Beck sells shirts on his site that show a picture of a baby polar bear with the words: “DRILL THROUGH THEIR A$$ …for cheaper gas!”

March 9, 2009: “So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research. … Eugenics. In case you don’t know what Eugenics led us to: the Final Solution. A master race! A perfect person…. The stuff that we are facing is absolutely frightening.”

March 13, 2009: Beck starts the 9-12 Project, whose purpose is “to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001 … we were not obsessed with red states, blue states or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the greatest nation ever created.”

There are 9 Principles and 12 Values associated with the project. The 9 Principles, which are “distilled” from 28 other principles supposedly “culled from all over the world and from centuries of great thinkers,” especially the Founding Fathers:

1. America is good. (Even when it does bad things.)
2. I believe in God and He is the center of my life. (along side Gold and Guns)
3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday. (Yet never admit being wrong about anything.)
4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government. (Remember that when the police come bashing down your door.)
5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it. (But since the father is the ultimate authority, no one can be arrested to pay that penalty.)
6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results. (Not even close.)
7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable. (The government can only force you to contribute to wars you don’t believe in.)
8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion. (But everyone on the Progressive side of this “left-right” conflict I’m not a part of are all un-American.)
9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me. (Remember that next time a cop pulls you over.)

The 12 Values are:
1. Honesty (stupidity doesn’t count as dishonesty, right?)
2. Reverence (for gold)
3. Hope (except for warnings of the coming Apocalypse)
4. Thrift (except for decade-long wars)
5. Humility (except Pride for Country, which is still below personal authority.)
6. Charity (to the super rich)
7. Sincerity (the ability to summon tears)
8. Moderation (because moderate times demand moderate actions)
9. Hard Work (not physical labor, of course, hard work talking to other people about the coming Apocalypse)
10. Courage (but only moderate courage)
11. Personal Responsibility (in telling people how it’s all the Left’s fault)
12. Gratitude (originally Friendship, but “friend” was too close to the word “comrade”)

April 28, 2009: “Perfect storm … just came onshore.”

May 5, 2009: “I’m tired of the politics of left and right. It’s about right and wrong. We argue back and forth — ‘If you haven’t voted for the donkey, you’re just a hatemonger.’ The other side — ‘Oh, those donkeys trying to turn us into communist Russia.’ Stop!”

June 1, 2009: “Pravda goes on and says, ‘Then their faith in God was destroyed until their churches, all tens of thousands of different branches and denominations were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant megapreachers were more than happy to sell their souls in flocks to be on the winning side of one pseudo-Marxist politician or another. Their flock may complain but when explained that they would be on the winning side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes of earthly power. The final collapse came with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months have been truly impressive. His spending and money-printing has been record-setting, not just in America’s short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more than another year–and there is no sign that it will not–America will best resemble the Weimar Republic and, at worst, Zimbabwe.’ My friend, I have told you these things were coming. I tell you now, they are coming. We must educate ourselves and be involved and put down our differences and connect with ?? make a vow to yourself today that there are Democrats out there, if you’re a Republican, that there are Democrats out there that truly get it.”

June 10, 2009: “You know, the anchor baby thing has always really hacked me off… You know the anchor baby. You know what that is. It’s when a child that is born here, becomes a citizen and they help the illegal parents become citizens, right?… Remember empathy. Oh, empathy. No one wants to separate that family. Oh, that baby is a child. It’s an anchor. It’s an anchor to stay here…. Why do we have automatic citizenship upon birth? Do you know? We’re the only country in the world that has it. Why?”

July 15, 2009: A new version of “The 5,000 Year Leap” by anti-Communist “historian” W. Cleon Skousen is published with a foreward written by Beck. Zaitchik writes:

“”Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined…..

W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”…

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade….

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO)….

“Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity,” says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. “By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years.”

In 1981, Skousen published “The 5,000 Year Leap,” the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn’t that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan’s second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text “The Making of America.” Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen’s book characterized African-American children as “pickaninnies” and described American slave owners as the “worst victims” of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, “The Making of America” explained that “[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains.””

As Zaitchik points out, Beck’s twin embrace of Cleon Skousen and Martin Luther King, Jr. is exceedingly ironic because Skousen and his allies like Ezra Taft Benson “were of course anti-civil rights.” In his biography of Beck, Zaitchik explains how “the second-generation of Skousens and Bensons…ran the Utah Birch Society and used it to create panic over civil rights, in one case by spreading rumors that blacks from Los Angeles were marching on Salt Lake City with plans to riot. The National Guard actually had to be called out.” Beck claims now to understand and embody the civil rights movement, but as Zaitchik told the Washington Post’s David Weigel, Beck has “a complete ignorance of black history and culture.”

July 15, 2009: The same day 5,000 Year Leap came out, Glenn Beck gets into an argument with a woman over health care and has a meltdown, screeching into the microphone, “Get off my phone you little pinhead!!!“

July 22, 2009: “I mean, we’ve got czars now, Czars like John Holdren, who has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”

July 28, 2009: Glenn Beck is invited on Fox and Friends to talk about the arrest of Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates at his own home for disorderly conduct, and says that Obama “has a deep seated hatred for white people or the white culture” and calls him a racist. Although it is not even the worst thing he has said in the past seven days, liberal bloggers managed to use this line to convince many of Beck’s commercial supporters to abandon his show, popularizing the line so much that just about every mainstream talk show host came to associate him with it.

August 27, 2009: Beck misspells Oligarchy as “O-L-I-G-A-R-H-Y” while inventing an acronym for the Obama Administration.

August 30, 2010: The comment continues to hound Beck like never before. Beck says that he’s “addressed this comment a million times,” and what he didn’t understand at the time about President Obama, who “writes about the white culture and [how] he’s struggled with it,” was that “it is much more of a theological question. That he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is ‘oppressor’ and ‘victim.’ Racist shouldn’t have been said, it was poorly said.”

September 6, 2009: Beck is able to get the Obama Administration to force Van Jones to resign over previous statements that he was once a Communist. Although Van Jones says he realized the necessity for a strong alliance with the business world to enact Green jobs, Beck continued to refer to him as a present-day Communist.

September 29, 2009: “As we told you last week, they are pushing day care. They are pushing day care. That way they can control the money that goes into day care, which means they can control the environment, and they can indoctrinate. This is — this is — you know, I said a while back at Christmas, you’re not even — now I said this a year ago Christmas — you’re not even going to recognize this country. You won’t even recognize it. Well put yourself back into the place that you were last Christmas, when I said that. Do you think you would — if I told you last Christmas that these things would happen by September that already are going on, would you say that I was a kook? Of course you would. There’s even more coming. By Christmas, you will not recognize it.”

October 2, 2009: A video of Beck is released of him putting vapor rub under his eyes to tear up for a photo shoot. Well known for breaking out to tears on stage, liberal bloggers use the video to insinuate that he uses the vapor rub for all of the “crying moments” of his show.

October 26, 2009: “By this Christmas, you’re not going to even recognize your country.”

November 2, 2009: Beck says Romney “opened the tent and gave you government health care that is now bankrupting the state…. That was my problem with the Massachusetts. Romneycare, I remember saying to him, ‘Mitt, you’re not king. You’re not going to be there forever. You opened the door, the progressives came in.'” Politifact.com: “So, while the program has become more expensive, it has not been the budget-buster that Beck suggests. We asked experts whether the state would still be facing a $5 billion deficit if the program hadn’t been put into place, and the resounding answer was “yes.””

November 12, 2009: “Do you know in the health care bill, we’re now offering insurance for dogs…”

November 24, 2009: “The final chapters, if we don’t wake up, America, are being written about us right now.”

November 30, 2009: “Let’s compare President Nixon — he’s over 50 percent — with President Obama: Under 10 percent of his appointees have any experience in the private sector.” Politifact.com: 7 out of 9 have business experience.

December 25, 2009: No apocalypse.

January 2010: Glenn Beck draws nearly three million viewers each night, making it at times the most-watched program on cable news.

March 10, 2010: “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes! If I’m going to Jeremiah’s Wright’s church? Yes! Leave your church. Social justice and economic justice. They are code words. If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish. Go alert your bishop and tell them, ‘Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?’ I don’t care what the church is. If it’s my church, I’m alerting the church authorities: ‘Excuse me, what’s this social justice thing?’ And if they say, ‘Yeah, we’re all in that social justice thing,” I’m in the wrong place.'”

The Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church, published by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, says this:

The Church’s social Magisterium constantly calls for the most classical forms of justice to be respected: commutative, distributive and legal justice. Ever greater importance has been given to social justice., which represents a real development in general justice, the justice that regulates social relationships according to the criterion of observance of the law. Social justice, a requirement related to the social question which today is worldwide in scope, concerns the social, political and economic aspects and, above all, the structural dimension of problems and their respective solutions….

Christianity Today says:

The National Association of Evangelicals has issued a similar statement on justice. In its 2001 statement of civic responsibility, “For the Health of the Nation,” the NAE states that “economic justice includes both the mitigation of suffering and also the restoration of wholeness.” The NAE also states that government has a “divine mandate to render justice (Rom. 13:1-7; 1 Pet. 2:13-17).”

“I don’t know what to make of Beck’s absurd rant,” wrote Dan Nejfelt of Faith in Public Life. “The fact that a person with a multimedia platform and an audience of millions is either so addled that he believes social justice is a tool of tyranny, or so craven that he would use fearmongering and vitriol to come between people and their churches, is—to say the least—a troubling indictment of what we as a society value and reward. I just hope nobody comes to believe that the Gospel According to Beck is the word of the Lord.”

March 11, 2010: “There is fear and hunger ahead of us.”

March 25, 2010: “Our leadership now is continuing to push for a cap-and-trade bill which will raise our energy prices and, of course, limit our own oil production…. It is September 11th all over again except we didn’t have the collapsing buildings, but we need God more than ever.”

March 25, 2010: “[I said] a perfect storm would come. It’s here.”

May 14, 2010: “There will be rivers of blood if we don’t have values and principles.”

May 25, 2010: “You will not recognize your country by Christmas. I don’t recognize my country now, but everyone will be on board by Christmas.”

May 26, 2010: “We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the civil rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”

May 27, 2010: After hearing Obama’s story about how his 11-year-old daughter Malia asked if he had “plugged the hole yet,” Beck begins acting out a parody of the little girl, saying: “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, did you plug the hole yet? Daddy?” and Obama answering “Not enough damage yet, honey.” Then: “Why do you hate black people so much?” With Obama answering: “I’m part white, honey.” He then went on to mock her “level of education” because of it being such a stupid question.

June 4, 2010: Beck endorses The Red Book: A ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots (1977), which he claims to have read “all night.” The book is a fascist conspiracy theory book accusing Roosevelt of a stooge of the Communists and praised Adolf Hitler. Elizabeth Dilling, an anti-Semite, was later tried for sedition. Three days later, Beck tries to dismiss the book as something he didn’t really look into.

June 7, 2010: “We don’t study the Holocaust [in America]…”

June 10, 2010: “They’ve changed the radical pose. And they’ve put themselves in power and they’ve made you the radical. Now, they can. Now, they can. A secret FBI report in 1976 noted that the Weather Underground was receiving aid from Cuba, technical assistance from North Korea. In other words, this was a situation that had the potential to become far, far worse with people like Bill Ayers who was OK with killing 10 percent of the people… These are the same people that are everywhere in the government and our education system. Please, please. Learn from history. Please.”

June 14, 2010: Glenn Beck stated that if he “get[s] out of control and start[s] leveling baseless charges that can’t be backed up,” then he would be “fired.”

June 2010: Gold Line, the company that Beck hocks gold for, goes under investigation for fraud. As pointed out by Ritzhotz.com, the coins are sold by Beck as a hedge against inflation against the coming economic armaggedon but the coins the firm sells are not gold bullion, which is what should be sold, but antique French coins that are overpriced due to numismatic value, meaning they’re priced higher because they’re antiques. This is sold on the excuse that the government can’t confiscate antique coins because of some obscure FDR law, but what it comes out to is that the buyer loses 42% of their “investment” instantly. A report done by Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner found that “the average Goldline mark-up was 90 percent above the melt value of the coin.” Additionally, the report asserts “Those same 18 coins could be found much cheaper on similar precious coin seller’s websites.” Plus, it alleges that Goldline’s salespeople misrepresent themselves as “investment advisers” or “financial advisers” – “implying that they have some sort of fiduciary responsibility to get you the most return on your investment.”

Even though Beck sells these coins on the normal part of his show as if it is an infomercial, Fox News actually has rules against their anchors supporting commercial products, but deemed that Beck had to be given some leeway due to the fact that he this was all part of the package of getting a radio host.

June 28, 2010: “The government is trying to now close the Lincoln Memorial for any kind of large gatherings,” Beck said. “This may be the last large gathering ever to assemble at the Lincoln Memorial. Historic, historic.”

July 10, 2010: “There is a lot there. This is kind of complex. Because Jesus did identify with the victims, but Jesus was not a victim. He was a conqueror. The death of Jesus Christ is a moment of victory, as is the resurrection. See, this is the main difference here, victims as opposed to messiahs, conquerors. Victims were conquerors. Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. He did have a choice. If he was a victim, and this [Liberation] theology was true, then Jesus would have come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did. That’s an abomination.”

July 12, 2010: “Blacks do not own Martin Luther King.”

July 2010: Beck University, a non-credited web-based education program, is launched, offering online classes in subjects such as religion, American history, and economics. Courses are offered to anyone who subscribes to Beck’s “Extreme Insider” program for $6.26 a month. Faith 101 is a course on American history taught by David Barton, an evangelical Christian minister and author who is known for his argument that the founding fathers renounced the separation of church and state. Hope 101 dealt with economics and was taught by David L. Buckner, a psychology and education professor. Charity 101 is a political science class taught by LSU professor James R. Stoner dedicated to how the Constitution and the Federalist Papers prove the U.S. is a charitable nation.

August 3, 2010: Glenn Beck says that the Islamic Community Center being built in New York is a “Allah tells me to blow up America mosque.” A week later, he says that “we have no right to stop” the building of the community center, but said it is “in extraordinarily bad taste, I think it’s foolish, I think it’s a slap in the face to do it.” He also false claims that it would open on 9/11, saying, “You want to open it on September 11? You’re a fool. You’re insulting people, but we have no right to stop you.”

August 12, 2010: “It’s here.”

August 28, 2010: Beck holds his 8/28 Restoring Honor event in Washington.

October 15: 2010: “And I get to the god of Ancient Babylon, and I see what happened in Ancient Babylon. And the god of Ancient Babylon was Baal. B-A-A-L. And this jumped out at me so much. I was just like, “Oh, my gosh.” And what it was, was ancient Babylon and the Tower of Babel — and we’ll do a show on this, but let me give you the highlights here. Basically, the king says, “You know what? We’re all gonna just– we’re all gonna be one.” And it’s the first socialism… totalitarianism. And the god of Ancient Babylon — Baal was the god of weather and war and commerce… And I thought to myself: ‘This is the same god.’ We are now worshiping — or the environmentalists are now worshiping — the ancient god of Babylon, the god of weather. And they’re saying, ‘You gotta worship the god of weather. That way, there won’t be war. And that way there’ll be commerce, and we can all live.’ It’s repeating itself from the very beginning.”

October 20, 2010: “Progressives have been fighting for decades to achieve the power to decide for you, and erase the Republicans, now they just want to call it a democracy. They’ve come a long, long way, bit by bit, piece by piece, they have been chipping away your individual freedoms. We call them progressives now, but back in Samuel Adams’ day, they used to call them tyrants. A little later, I think they’re also called slave owners — people that encourage you to become more dependent on them, and it’s working.

November 9, 2010: On the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, Glenn Beck begins a multi-episode attack on Jewish philanthropist George Soros by falsely suggesting that he was a Holocaust collaborator. Beck blames Soros for the fact that when he was 14, after the Nazis invaded his native Hungary, he was forced to travel along with Nazis who confiscated property and even falsely accused Soros of helping them and then not feeling any guilt about it. And even though Soros is a capitalist financier, he is accused of being the head of a Socialist conspiracy, which will become a new central theme of his show. Beck even uses anti-Semitic stereotypes in disparaging the holocaust survivor.

Media Matters writes:

“Beck pointed to George Soros’ past support of various political movements in Europe, like the Rose and Orange Revolutions and the coups in Croatia and Yugoslavia, and claimed Soros was attempting to recreate similar revolutionary changes of regime in America. Author Richard Poe connected Soros’ previous work to Beck’s accusation that Soros’ “target” is the United States. But the governments Soros supposedly helped bring down were autocratic ones, often headed by former Communist leaders. The Velvet Revolution led to the establishment of Slovakia as an independent nation and eventual inclusion in NATO. Similarly, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine was a non-violent response to a disputed election that involved poisonings and assassination attempts. And the Rose Revolution replaced Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, a former Soviet official, with Mikheil Saakashvili, who Beck himself has heavily praised.”

November 11, 2010: The Anti-Defamation League condemns Glenn Beck’s series on George Soros

November 15, 2010: “This is the perfect storm I told you about five years ago. This is it.”

November 18, 2010: Beck demonizes the same veterans group he praised in 2007 as part of his made-up Soros conspiracy.

November 30, 2010: “The storm is here.”

December 25, 2010: Still no apocalypse.

January 2011: Glenn Beck’s ratings drop to the 1.6-1.8 million range, almost half the ratings Beck had in January 2010.

January 31, 2011: “When you take the Marxist and you combine them with the radical from Islam, when you combine those forces, which is exactly — we’ll show you this week — what is happening here, the whole world starts to implode.”

February 4, 2011: “We told you this week how if (President Hosni) Mubarak does step down, however, the Muslim Brotherhood would be the most likely group to seize power. They’ve openly stated they want to declare war on Israel and they would end the peace agreement with Israel and they would work towards instituting something we told you about, a caliphate.”

February 14, 2011: Neo-Conservative pundit Bill Kristol writes: “Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it’s a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice. But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.”

February 22, 2011: “This is what we’ve been discussing right here on my old TV show and my old radio show for a long, long time. It’s called the perfect storm. And I can’t honestly believe that we’re finally here.”

February 25, 2011: “I think Nancy Reagan may have been the one who had the most people on the staff. She had three. Three! The first lady’s office needs 43 people? For what? These people are out of control. It is really Marie Antoinette.”

February 27, 2011: Glenn Beck lashes out at Kristol on his radio program, saying: “I don’t even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy… People like Bill Kristol, I don’t think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They’ll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they’ll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched.” Beck defended his theories by reading from the work of the Muslim writer Zudhi Jasser, a sharp critic of most Muslim leaders, to argue of the threat from “Islamic socialism.” He also accused Kristol of propping up Hosni Mubarak, of being stuck in 1973, and of failing to see that “we are fighting the forces of evil on this planet… I think he’s still trying to get Bob Dole elected, i’m not really sure… Have you done a minute of research Bill?” Beck asked later, promising to expose the ties between the left and Islamic radicals during this week’s television show and advising Kristol, “Just watch the show in the next week.”

March 1, 2011: “This may come as a shock, but I can’t find collective bargaining in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. I can’t find it. In fact, FDR said collective bargaining would destroy us. Yes, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Look it up.” Actually, Roosevelt signed groundbreaking legislation protecting collective bargaining rights. FDR did not oppose public employee unions. He opposed strikes by federal public employee unions.

March 7, 2011: Rumor bounds that Fox may be looking to get out of renewing Beck’s contract.

March 15, 2011: “We can’t see the connections here. I’m not saying God is causing earthquakes – well I’m not not saying that either! What God does is God’s business. But I’ll tell you this – there’s a message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.”

March 21, 2011: Glenn Beck dismisses Martin Luther King’s fight for labor rights. Wait, wait, hold it, just a second. Dr. King lost his life for collective bargaining for the public unions, really? Did you know that? ‘Cause — that — we have to update our history books, because I didn’t know that. Did you know that?”

David Neiwart writes: “This is why Beck’s constant posturing on behalf of the civil-rights movement — mostly in order to claim a King-like aura for himself — is so bizarre. In order for Glenn Beck to convince his fellow conservatives to adopt this mantle, he essentially has to persuade millions of people who have opposed it with every fiber of their beings for most of their lives to completely reverse course and claim the opposite of their former beliefs.” As Media Matters points out, Martin Luther King would have been on Glenn Beck’s chalkboard.

March 21, 2011: Glenn Beck gets into an argument over whether the Book of Revelation is fictional and calls MSNBC “the most anti-god network ever put on the air in the history of America… The world is about to be plunged into complete and utter darkness and despair. Quite honestly, famine will follow.”

March 22, 2011: “Chaos is from the dark side, Luke. It is part of evil. It is not a coincidence that chaos is ruling the world. It is why I have also been telling you this is a global project. You can not take down the United States government without taking down the entire system. It is the coming insurrection. It is the coming of the Caliphate. It is the cries for Revolution. It is Chaos. If they can make things so chaotic, then they must change. It is top-down, bottom-up, inside-out, it is what I told you would happen this summer when I said, ‘Watch.’ They need to push you into a place to where you rise up so they can provide the answer. That is what is now being planned. This plan was – is — supposed to happen in May, I hope by exposing it, if enough people will talk about, it won’t happen, but you must educate your friends, because they are going to be used, and and I said this is evil. What does, I’m sorry to get all Biblical on you MSNBC, but what does Satan do? He takes a germ of truth…”

March 29, 2011: Media Matters writes that “Glenn Beck suggested that the efforts of Jewish Funds for Justice and Media Matters to ‘accelerat[e] Beck’s decline’ are not working because ‘the lights are on’ in his studio. In fact, Beck’s Fox News program has lost over 300 advertisers, he has lost more than 1 million viewers over the last year, his radio show has been kicked off various stations including ones in New York and Philadelphia, and there is a possibility that Fox News executives are reportedly ‘contemplating life without’ Beck.”

April 6, 2011: Fox News announces Glenn Beck’s daily show will be ending some time this year. New York Times reporter Brian Stelter tells CNN that those on “the news side of Fox” were embarrassed by Beck.

April 7, 2011: “One year from now, you on the Left will be crapping yourselves so much — you haven’t — you haven’t crapped in your pants as much as you will in a year from now as you — as you you did since you were a child — maybe more — you’ll be making more — you’ll crap yourself more than when you were a baby — and you will find Jesus. You will suddenlly find religion and you will be kneeling at some altar lighting candles every day, praying to Jesus that Glenn Beck would please just to do 5:00 on the Fox News Channel. There’s my prediction… All right, here’s our sponsor though… Okay, you’ll be praying to Gaia.”