WE ARE DEVO! Fascinating and super scary article in Salon about W. Cleon Skousen, the late right-wing Mormon crank and author of The Five Thousand Year Leap and The Naked Communist. Although he died in 2006, thanks to Beck’s touting of The Five Thousand Year Leap (which he claims “changed his life”) Skousen’s got a #1 best seller on Amazon. The Five Thousand Year Leap serves as the philosophical underpinning of Beck’s so called 912 Project. I had never read anything about this guy before this article—having better things to read than books Glenn Beck recommends (although I did like The Coming Insurrection a lot, Glenn!)—but I’m even more convinced now that Beck and his army of idiots are shaping up to be an American version of the Taliban. Who thought life in America in 2009 would so resemble a freakin’ Jack T. Chick comic?!?!?
NewMajority‘s David Frum has called Beck’s hero one of the “legendary cranks of the conservative world, a John Bircher, a grand fantasist of theories about secret conspiracies between capitalists and communists to impose a one-world government.”
From the Salon article Meet the Man Who Changed Glenn Beck’s Life by Alexander Zaitchik:
What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs—based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith—that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).
But more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”
As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
