New York – Critics: Radio TV Host Glenn Beck Too Powerful

New York – Glenn Beck, the hottest right-wing voice on the air, worried aloud to his listeners the other day that powerful, sinister forces trying to destroy America might soon “shoot me in the head.”

But there’s fear among his critics, including calmer conservatives, that the victim more likely will be one of Beck’s many broadcast targets.

After a summer of mob anger at town hall meetings on health care – some of which featured gun-toting protesters – and a burst of Beck-fanned hysteria over President Obama’s back-to-school speech last week, the former top 40 deejay has emerged as a goofy dark prince of the right.

His gift for spinning apocalyptic visions of the future is matched only by his melodramatic skill to gin up his listeners.

“‘The world is going to hell in a handbasket’ – I think that pretty much summarizes Glenn Beck,” said Charles Dunn, a Regent University professor and author of “The Future of Conservatism.”

“But I also think he’s become the head cheerleader of getting people to respond – the tea parties, the health care town halls.”

“Glenn is great at what he does,” added Michael Smerconish, a conservative whose show runs in New York on WOR, the same station as Beck’s show. “But I just wonder – at what cost?

“I mean, disagree with the President – absolutely,” added Smerconish. “But be leery of using some of the words that have now entered this debate.”

A sampler:

* Beck, 45, has called Obama a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people” – comments that have sparked an advertising boycott of his Fox News Channel show.
* He declares the nation is headed toward a “fascist state” and that the White House is infested with “radical, revolutionary and in some cases Marxist” advisers.
*
He claims Obama’s entire agenda – including health care – is designed to “settle old racial scores” and that Americans must rise up to take back their nation. “The time for silent dissent has long passed,” Beck warned last week in a typical call to arms.

It’s an us-versus-them view of the world, with Americans’ freedom and very lives in imminent peril; a foreboding, racially polarized vision of America under siege by a conspiracy of liberals, “anti-capitalists” and other players in an Obama “thugocracy” who must be stopped at all costs.

Ron Kessler, author of “In The President’s Secret Service,” notes that although it is impossible to single out Beck as a cause, threats against Obama are up 400% compared with those against President George W. Bush.

“A lot of those threats are racially based,” Kessler said. “So there is a real basis for concern.”

Even as he echoes far-right theories, Beck tries to cast himself as simply a libertarian – a believer in self-reliance – whose show fuses “entertainment with enlightenment.”

A former alcoholic and drug addict, he now mocks himself as a “rodeo clown” – one of the comedy bits he adds to his daily stew on evil government plots.

But here’s what Beck critics consider the scariest part: Americans are eating him up.

His radio show is now No. 3 in America, with a following both younger and more female than the top two, conservatives Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

His TV show routinely pulls in more than 2.5 million viewers daily, placing him third among all cable news programs. On some recent nights, Beck’s 5 p.m. show outdrew long-reigning cable news champ Bill O’Reilly, who holds a prime-time slot.

Heady stuff for a self-confessed sufferer of attention deficit disorder who barely attended college and, in his drinking days, once fired an employee for handing him the wrong kind of pen.

A convert to Mormonism, Beck lives in a $4.25 million home in Connecticut, with his second wife, Tania, and their four kids.

Beck spent decades working in morning deejay slots around the country, from Baltimore to Houston to Phoenix to New Haven.

His big break came in 2006, when CNN Headline News gave him a show. Soon Fox came calling and Beck became famous as the crying commentator for his on-air weeping, usually inspired by some new evidence that America was going down the drain.

“I just love my country, and I fear for it,” he quavered.

His clout is still growing, and last weekend Beck landed his first knockout punch – the resignation of Van Jones, President Obama’s “green jobs czar.”

It was Beck who spotlighted video of Jones referring to Republicans as “a——-,” and a petition Jones signed suggesting that Bush knowingly let the 9/11 attacks happen.

Not surprisingly, he is now going after other Obama czars as dangerous radicals.

But it is the undercurrent of paranoia that permeates Beck’s show that has liberal critics and conservatives alike expressing concern he will inspire violence.

Christopher Balfe, who head’s Beck’s media company, said that’s nonsense. “Glenn has clearly, repeatedly and unequivocally denounced violence and promoted peaceful, nonviolent expression,” he said.

But to many, such disclaimers are drowned out by hours of overheated, fear-stoking rants.

“It’s a subtle incitement toward violence, all the time,” said Cenk Uygur, anchor of the “The Young Turks,” a liberal-leaning show on Sirius Radio, who follows Beck closely. “He is saying, ‘They are coming for us.’

“And you know, he doesn’t need to convince his whole audience to go do something stupid and violent,” Uygur added. “He only needs to convince one.”