One of the traumas of growing up Mormon in the 1960s, 70s & 80s was having to deal with the crazy people who subscribed to the crazy political ideas of Cleon Skousen, a nut job so extreme in his right-wing insanity that the church unofficially repudiated him and officially distanced itself from him. Turns out Glenn Beck lists Skousen's work as among his most important influences. This piece from Salon on the man who changed Glenn Beck's life is just so damn depressing, and forced me to relive some of the worst parts of my adolescence--moments where I KNEW, thanks to basic logic, that the stuff someone was spouting was batshit crazy, but their immunity to logic made argument impossible, especially since, being young and still relatively uneducated, logic was all I had on my side, while the crazy grownup had all this "information."
Ugh.
I just can't believe we're here again. I remain firmly agnostic on the question of god's existence, but at moments like this, I definitely believe in pure, malevolent evil. It's the simplest explanation for why Glenn Beck actually has influence in this world.
Leave a comment