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

regards it as pure genius. “Welles inspired me to believe that I can create anything that I can see or imagine,” he concludes. Even if it is based on a lie.
    To the chagrin of Fox News, Beck, even as he has chased away advertisers, has done an exceptional job marketing one product: himself. He often directs Fox viewers to his own Web site, GlennBeck.com , encouraging them to purchase an elite membership. One night, he devoted a segment to promoting his own one-man show on Broadway.
    “Tomorrow night here in New York at the Nokia Theater in Times Square I’m doing a program,” Beck told Fox viewers. “You can see it on ‘The Insider’ at GlennBeck.com .” That’s the pay-extra membership class. “I’m doing a show called ‘The Future of History’ because we’ve got to learn history to be able to face our future.”
    What brings all of Beck’s moneymaking ventures—TV, radio, Web, publishing, speaking—together is a common theory that doomsday means payday. Though it’s a huge audience for cable news, Beck’s viewership as a proportion of the American public is small: 0.9 percent. Though figures are less reliable for radio, that audience could be as high as 3 percent of the population.
    But this tiny slice of the American public is passionate and highly motivated, and they will evidently do, and buy, what Glenn Beck tells them to do and buy. If he tells them that the world economy is collapsing, that currencies are becoming worthless, and that they should buy gold, they buy gold. Conveniently enough, a top sponsor of Beck’s radio, TV, and Internet ventures is Goldline, a big gold dealer.
    Go to GlennBeck.com and you see a banner advertisement across the top: “Goldline. Trusted and Used by Glenn Beck.” To the right of that is another ad, with a photo of Beck: “Goldline International. Get Your Free Investor Kit.” Below that is a third ad: “Click for a free investment kit. Trusted and used by Glenn Beck.” His smiling face is next to a gold coin. If you click on the ads, you’ll wind up at a site announcing “Glenn Beck Recommends Goldline” or a photo of Beck and his testimonial: “Before I started turning you on to Goldline, I wanted to look them in the eye. This is a top-notch organization that’s been in business since 1960.” Other links say, “Goldline Is Glenn Beck’s Choice for Gold” and give the advice that “some analysts believe that gold may rise to several thousand dollars per ounce.”
    Among those “analysts” is Beck himself. He has the Goldline president, Mark Albarian, on his show frequently, interviewing his sponsor about the merits of gold. “So, Mark, I saw a story last night that said we’re … we’re running out of gold,” Beck began one such interview. “Is that even possible?”
    “I think it is,” Albarian replied. “Now, we won’t actually run out of gold, but you’ll see much higher prices in my opinion.”
    Beck said a price of $2,500 per ounce would be “reasonable.” It was about $1,100 an ounce at the time of the interview.
    “There was an article on AOL where they talked about how you could get to $2,750,” Albarian added.
    “I think people are running out of options on what, you know, could be worth something at all,” Beck said. “You have to think like a German Jew, 1934.” Extending the analogy to Weimar hyperinflation, Beck predicted that people could “make more in the commodities in the short term than they can in the dollar because the dollar is going to continue to fall.”
    Seven months after this forecast, gold had climbed 9 percent—not bad. But the dollar, which Beck predicted would collapse, was up more than twice as much over that same period—21 percent against the euro.
    But for Beck, it’s always a good time to buy gold, particularly from Goldline. Back in December 2008, he had Albarian on his show and the host spoke of a “1989-style Soviet collapse” for the American economy. “Still a good time to buy