Last month, I did something that, according to Nielsen ratings, about 2.3 million people do every weekday. I watched “Glenn Beck,” an early evening show on the Fox News Channel – mostly to see with my own eyes the man who was now, according to The New York Times, “one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger.”

I can’t remember exactly what Glenn Beck was harping on the day I tuned in. I remember, instead, what he did. He paced the stage uneasily. He pounded at a blackboard. He crept toward the camera, imploring his audience with a weepy eagerness to take his polemics at face value. The new leader of the nation’s conservative populist movement reminded me, mostly, of my high school math teacher.

Beck’s on-air disposition – a high wire act between near-sanity and full-fledged fanaticism – is enough to turn off any average viewer. But his actual positions are even more unsettling. Beck argued earlier this year, for instance, that President Obama “has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” On the 9/11 victims’ families, he said without hesitation: “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.”

Beck’s politics represent a kind of warped libertarianism, which views all government intervention – from regulating freewheeling investment banks to providing poor Americans with affordable health care – as a threat to the nation’s survival. The president, according to Mr. Beck, is leading the country down a path to “socialism” and “dictatorship.” Beck has little interest in facts. He is concerned, instead, with incendiary rhetoric and apocalyptic fear-mongering.

So the news last weekend that Beck was hosting a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – on the 47-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech on those same steps, no less – was disconcerting. Although Beck assured everyone that his choice of date was merely a scheduling coincidence – and that he would be speaking a full two steps down from where King gave his famous address – the event could not shake the air of presumption.

It was impossible, in the aftermath of this event, to miss the irony of a mostly white, middle-aged crowd aspiring to take up the mantle of the civil rights movement. The Tea Party, of which Beck has long been the de facto leader, has also been marred by a laundry list of racially tinged incidents – starting in 2009 with the homemade sign of Dale Robertson, the founder of TeaParty.org, comparing Congress to a “slave owner” and taxpayers to the N word. Incidents like this one – including the alleged racial and homophobic slurs that were hurled by Tea Party protesters at members of Congress during the vote on the health care bill this year – raise more than a few questions.

Glenn Beck is not a legitimate leader of a movement. He is a self-acknowledged businessman with a TV show. “I could give a flying crap about the political process,” Beck told Forbes this year. Mercury Radio Arts, his production company, he explained, is “an entertainment company.” During his time away from preaching his far-out views on his Fox News show and radio program, Beck serves as a pitchman for Goldline International, hawking risky investment advice to daytime television audiences.

Beck’s meteoric rise has generated unease among Democrats who see his new popularity as a threat to their chances of survival in the midterm elections this year. But Beck’s newly anointed position as the head of disaffected American conservatives belies a deficit of true Republican leadership. That Beck has enjoyed so much influence in a midterm election year is a testament only to the failure of conservatives to find a leader who can articulate their dissent without the hysterical pontification that Beck has made his trademark.

Peter Fulham is a sophomore in the College. He can be reached at fulhamthehoya.com. POTOMAC VIEWS appears every other Friday.

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Last month, I did something that, according to Nielsen ratings, about 2.3 million people do every weekday. I watched “Glenn Beck,” an early evening show on the Fox News Channel – mostly to see with my own eyes the man who was now, according to The New York Times, “one of the most powerful media voices for the nation’s conservative populist anger.”

I can’t remember exactly what Glenn Beck was harping on the day I tuned in. I remember, instead, what he did. He paced the stage uneasily. He pounded at a blackboard. He crept toward the camera, imploring his audience with a weepy eagerness to take his polemics at face value. The new leader of the nation’s conservative populist movement reminded me, mostly, of my high school math teacher.

Beck’s on-air disposition – a high wire act between near-sanity and full-fledged fanaticism – is enough to turn off any average viewer. But his actual positions are even more unsettling. Beck argued earlier this year, for instance, that President Obama “has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” On the 9/11 victims’ families, he said without hesitation: “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.”

Beck’s politics represent a kind of warped libertarianism, which views all government intervention – from regulating freewheeling investment banks to providing poor Americans with affordable health care – as a threat to the nation’s survival. The president, according to Mr. Beck, is leading the country down a path to “socialism” and “dictatorship.” Beck has little interest in facts. He is concerned, instead, with incendiary rhetoric and apocalyptic fear-mongering.

So the news last weekend that Beck was hosting a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial – on the 47-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech on those same steps, no less – was disconcerting. Although Beck assured everyone that his choice of date was merely a scheduling coincidence – and that he would be speaking a full two steps down from where King gave his famous address – the event could not shake the air of presumption.

It was impossible, in the aftermath of this event, to miss the irony of a mostly white, middle-aged crowd aspiring to take up the mantle of the civil rights movement. The Tea Party, of which Beck has long been the de facto leader, has also been marred by a laundry list of racially tinged incidents – starting in 2009 with the homemade sign of Dale Robertson, the founder of TeaParty.org, comparing Congress to a “slave owner” and taxpayers to the N word. Incidents like this one – including the alleged racial and homophobic slurs that were hurled by Tea Party protesters at members of Congress during the vote on the health care bill this year – raise more than a few questions.

Glenn Beck is not a legitimate leader of a movement. He is a self-acknowledged businessman with a TV show. “I could give a flying crap about the political process,” Beck told Forbes this year. Mercury Radio Arts, his production company, he explained, is “an entertainment company.” During his time away from preaching his far-out views on his Fox News show and radio program, Beck serves as a pitchman for Goldline International, hawking risky investment advice to daytime television audiences.

Beck’s meteoric rise has generated unease among Democrats who see his new popularity as a threat to their chances of survival in the midterm elections this year. But Beck’s newly anointed position as the head of disaffected American conservatives belies a deficit of true Republican leadership. That Beck has enjoyed so much influence in a midterm election year is a testament only to the failure of conservatives to find a leader who can articulate their dissent without the hysterical pontification that Beck has made his trademark.

Peter Fulham is a sophomore in the College. He can be reached at fulhamthehoya.com. POTOMAC VIEWS appears every other Friday.

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