Glenn Beck's Novel Plays With Fire

Glenn Beck's new novel isn't just bad. It also displays how he cynically manipulates his readers with dangerous ideas -- including fanning "truthers" of terrorist attacks.

One disturbing aspect of Glenn Beck’s new novel seems to have passed over every reviewer who has read it. In the novel, Beck (and his team of ghostwriters) decided to make one of the heroes of the novel a conspiracy theorist who believes that the July 7th bombings were carried out by the British government. Beck tries to pass this character off as a flawed but earnest eccentric. In reality, his treatment of the character expresses Beck’s cynicism and demonstrates how he manipulates his readers with dangerous ideas.

The relevant section is Chapter 38. At this point in the story, Tea Party stand-in Danny Bailey is being driven by NYPD Agent Kearnes across Nevada to help deliver a fake nuclear warhead. (Spoiler Alert! The nuclear bomb is not a fake. Bailey and Kearnes have been set up to have the bomb explode in Las Vegas to implicate the patriots of America in an act of domestic terrorism.)

As Bailey and Kearnes are driving along they learn that the government has, very suspiciously, raised the Terror Alert Level and issued a warning about a possible domestic attack. Bailey, the conspiracy minded Tea Partier, senses something is up:

“You remember the 7/7 bombings in 2005?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know that a security company, with a former Scotland Yard guy in charge, was running a terrorism drill in London that very morning?...And then it really happened. While they were running the drill, the exact, actual thing they were practicing for actually fricking happened. What are the odds of that being a coincidence?”

Bailey then goes one step further and starts making claims about the perpetrators of the attack:

“do you know that the guy your old friends in the U.S. government believe was the actual mastermind of those bombings—his name is Haroon Rashid Aswat—was also some sort of protected double agent who was on the payroll of some obscure faction of MI6? The CIA knew all about him but weren’t allowed to touch him”

And later:

“Mohamed Atta is dead.”

“Yeah? So is Osama bin Laden, but that doesn’t stop him from putting out a tape every six months. And I’m not even saying it's a real life Islamo-fascist behind any of this, but making it look that way will make the story that much scarier when something happens.”

Why does Beck want one of the main characters, someone the reader is supposed to sympathize and identify with, to believe in conspiracy theories?

In an interview with Fox News, Beck himself contends that this character is meant to serve as an example of why conspiracy mongers are wrong:

We included him specifically to show that those who live on the fringes or who embrace radical conspiracies will never be taken seriously and can never play a large role in any kind of movement.

Not taken seriously? Well in Chapter 11, Bailey gives a rousing speech to an assembled Tea Party crowd and even when some people in the crowd find his rhetoric extreme, they hang onto his every word.

Other characters take him seriously as well. In the same chapter where Bailey lays out his truther vision, the NYPD officer claims he is unconvinced. The novel’s narrator however, knows differently:

Danny looked across occasionally at the older man, hoping that he’d at least planted a seed of warning. In that small way it seemed he’d been successful. You can’t see another man’s thoughts, but you can sure see him thinking.

Beck also clearly takes him seriously. In the Appendix to the novel, Beck warns that Bailey’s speech in Chapter 11 “shows how selected facts and truths can be used as the foundation for an overall thesis that is entirely fictional.” In the next paragraph, he starts explaining where Bailey gets the non-fictional facts and dates he uses in his speech.

How does Beck justify including the July 7th trutherism? He again sets it up as an example of why conspiracy theorists are problematic:

He mentions, for example, that here was a training exercise going on in London on the morning of the 7/7 bombings. That is complexly true, but this is a good example of the difference between something being a fact, and an assumption that is based on a fact.

Beck then explains why the mainstream media didn’t find the coincidence theory to be a “plausible scenario”, though his appendix has nothing to explicitly refute his idea that the July 7th terrorists were trained by MI6.

Beck ultimately evades the issue of whether having a main character engage in conspiracy mongering is a good idea:

My point is that there is a great danger in the way facts can be spun or strung together to give credibility to what is otherwise a wild-eyes conspiracy theory. It is our responsibility to look at everything with a skeptical eye, and also to be aware that many will try to twist reality to serve their own agenda or reinforce their worldview.

(The obvious point needs to made that Beck’s warning against conspiracy theory is undercut by the premise of his novel, which is that there is a giant conspiracy going on.)

Beck cynically dances around the issue. His conspiracy theorist may not “lead” the movement, but he is not ostracized either. His thesis might be wrong, but the data he uses is correct. Beck claims that the character “comes to the realization” that he can’t change America by being on the fringe, yet he ultimately has the right instincts on what the nefarious plan is.

By linking his conspiracy ramblings to an actual terrorist attack, Beck has crossed a line. He trivializes an act of terrorism and writes about the British government killing its own citizens with the same ease of asserting that the Illuminati set the Fed’s interest rates. If he had suggested that the planes that flew into the World Trade Center were remote controlled, there would at least be outrage and not just reviews mocking the cheesy dialogue.

Follow Noah Kristula-Green on twitter: @noahkgreen