"What Glenn Beck's Conspiracy Theory looks like if you scratch beneath the surface"

Hume's Ghost sent me a typically trenchant e mail the other day. It made a huge impression on me, because it speaks directly to the theme of my new, half-written book--the ideological and emotive continuities between conspiracist movements in American history.

I came across this link the other day and found it to be extremely remarkable. It's from David Duke's website and is almost verbatim the conspiracy theory that Beck posits on a daily basis about the Soros/Obama/ACORN/SEIU/Apollo Alliance/Van Jones/SDS nexus of evil, but with the added level of it also being a Rothschild's conspiracy. It's the same conspiracy but presented in its naked, racist form.What is so insidious about Beck's role on tv is that he makes implicit appeals to the same prejudices. I also noticed that the article talks about the tentacles of Soros organizations ruining the country and what not; Bill O'Reilly just said virtually the same thing on Fox the other day. It's why I've taken to describing such attacks on Soros as para-antisemitic.

Since at least the 1880s, a unifying strain of almost all American conspiracism, on the far left and black nationalist fringes as much as the white supremacist right, has been the London/Wall Street/Rothschild nexus.Political anti-Semitism went largely underground in this country after the Holocaust; the overt expression of racist, sexist, and even homophobic slurs are gradually becoming socially unacceptable as well. But the hatred that animates them hasn't gone away--it's been translated into code or displaced onto surrogates, like Muslims or Progressives. If you look closely at Glenn Beck, there is very little ideological difference between him and the extreme anti-FDR right of the 1930s, except he doesn't quote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the air, as Father Coughlin did. But as Hume's Ghost notes, he comes perilously close.