Glenn Beck proved that acting crazy can make you fabulously wealthy even if it occasionally costs you your job. So, his latest paranoid ravings can certainly be considered as little more than what he does to pay the bills. Yet, if there are people who are genuinely friends with Glenn Beck…people who actually love him and care what happens to him…they might want to start talking to an intervention specialist.
It’s getting to the point now where perhaps the beast has slipped the leash. Obviously, it’s not good for the health of the country to have Glenn Beck saying these things to millions of listeners. But there’s a chance here that Beck has slipped into bona fide madness. This may longer be an act. Or, at least, the line between act and reality may have blurred to the point that Beck can no longer delineate the border.
What’s he’s describing is basically an internal mental process where this kind of border is disappearing.
“This is the biggest show ever,” he warned. “That’s all that’s happening right now. This is a show. We’re watching a script and a play play out in front of us. None of this stuff is real. Those riots in Baltimore. That wasn’t real … At some point, there will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it will set the whole country on fire. And what happens? We will cry out for police help. The police will be overwhelmed. The DOJ will say, ‘We’re going to take over policing, we’ll coordinate it from here.’ And you’re done. It’s lights out, republic.”
It’s this perception that basic reality is not the real story that concerns me. He’s been spewing paranoid beliefs for a while, so that alone is not out of the ordinary. But this doubt about the basic reality of what he’s seeing with his eyes is new. And it’s accompanied by him taking the paranoia up several notches.
“If you look back at history, what happens to people who have voices and can cobble together people and be a leader?” he asked. “If you go back to what happened with the Armenian genocide, what is the first thing the Turks did? What is the first thing the Nazis did? You have a Night of Long Knives. The Armenian genocide. Any of the Armenians that could lead, any mayor, any writer, any person that was a hero in war, in one day, in each city, they would kill about 1,000 people. They’d just slaughter them. And they were all the leaders of the community. Anyone that people would rally around and follow. They were killed, day one. They just disappear, or they’re killed.”
“There are 10 million people that listen to this show. They cannot kill 10 million people in one night. You were born for a reason, and you’re listening to this show for a reason,” Beck stated. “Prepare for a time when voices like mine or others are no longer heard and yours is the only voice.”
Now, I don’t want to contribute to the paranoia here, but the reason people may not hear Beck’s voice much longer is because he probably needs to take a break from broadcasting and get some serious psychological help. I know that he’s one of the nation’s greatest charlatans, and it’s possible that he knows exactly what he’s doing. But I think he is showing signs of mental and emotional crisis. The voices he says are in his head may actually be there.
“We’re being set up, guys. We are absolutely being set up,” Beck said. “And I don’t know — this is what I pray every night: ‘I don’t know how to do this, Lord. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know — I don’t know what you want.’ I can’t wake up anyone. Oh, if I had the voice of an angel. I can’t wake anybody else up. They’ve smeared me. I’ve helped them smear me. I don’t have any credibility. Nobody is listening. I can tell you what’s coming. I’ve told you every step of the way. I know what’s coming next.”
In any case, this is not the kind of thing people should be listening to. If he’s not crazy, he’s certainly acting crazy enough that it’s irresponsible to profit off it. The government shouldn’t yank him off the air, but someone should. If not his friends and family, then maybe the station directors.
