Sort of the side dish to compliment the main course...

Interview: Alexander Zaitchik

Alexander Zaitchik deconstructs Glenn Beck

By CHRIS FARAONE | August 23, 2010

It's hard to find words to describe how equally salacious and asinine it is that, on August 28, Fox News merrymaker Glenn Beck is hosting a Tea Party rally on the National Mall to coincide with the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. Which is why I called on former New York Press editor and Salon contributor Alexander Zaitchik, author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance (Wiley), to explain this supreme stroke of propagandist irony. Before Zaitchik heads to Washington along with the crazies, he'll read from his exposé at Brookline Booksmith next Thursday, where plenty a lefty will no doubt share some good laughs at the expense of the dangerously credulous Fox News fanatic base.

You went in search of Glenn Beck's roots in Top 40 and talk radio. What was your course of action?

I knew that Tampa [Beck's first big talk-radio market] was the pivot city, so I started there to interview Ted Webb, who's a legendary DJ in the Tampa market. From there I went chronologically and started in Washington State.

What was it like for you to drop into some of these highly conservative environments?

The retirement villages in Tampa were shocking — something like a cross between a Hollywood film set and Disney World. They're just full of really wealthy old conservatives on golf carts, and they're all pinch-faced angry and wearing American-flag gear with Beck's books clenched to their chests. It was one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life.

What was your bombshell interview?

One that stands out in my mind is when I first found out that he had made fun of a woman on the air for having a miscarriage. The other guy who was fascinating was one of the only anonymous sources in the book; he was the one who told me about Beck's obsession with marketing theory in the early '90s, and how he used to quote Joseph Goebbels: "If you tell one big lie enough times it becomes the truth." That was back when Beck was driving around in his DeLorean, wasted.

Is Beck capable of shocking you at this point?

It would be pretty hard. One week he's recommending some neo-Nazi tract, and the next week he's pulling out some weird old anti-Semitic tract, and the next he's claiming that he's Martin Luther King and Thomas Jefferson. At this point, I think the whole country is pretty numb to his idiocy; the real shocking thing is that millions of people continue to take this guy seriously.

How much hate mail have you gotten?

The venom has trickled in, but it's nothing like when I published the first piece on Salon in September. I was getting a lot of attacks where people try to shut down your e-mail by putting you on a million lists, and then I was just getting all that "You godless socialist go back to Russia" kind of stuff, and thinly veiled threats that made me realize that I didn't want to do any readings in Utah.

What might Glenn Beck do next that could really blow people's minds?

The final frontier for him is like a Glenn Beck reality show where he has cameras in his home and in his shower, and you can watch him sit in his study and pretend to be a scholar. The guy has just always been obsessed with recording himself; even when he had that hemorrhoid operation, he recorded himself in the hospital, and if you can't get enough of him before the Fox show, there are six different camera angles from which you can watch him do his radio show every day.

Are you done with this?

I took a long break after the book first came out; now I'm back in it. But once you figure out his template, it's easy to know exactly what he's going to do, and how he's going to plug and play into any issue. His operating procedure is basically to just piss off the left and throw incredibly rancid red meat at his base. Everything else just kind of takes care of itself.

How big is the Glenn Beck rally in Washington, DC, going to be?

Based on my following the Tea Party scene around the country, I think it's going to be pretty big. Even little groups in Pennsylvania and Ohio are in some cases sending three buses. You forget how many people will drop what they're doing and take away their vacation days to go to a Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin rally. This is their social event of the year. He's also talking about this big announcement on the 27th that's going to drive the left out of their minds, and I can't wait. He also said he's going to do something on the 28th that hasn't been done in 200 years. Who the fuck knows?

President Beck?

I doubt it. It's probably something more like a ritual burning of an American flag on the National Mall or something stupid like that.