Anyone who had just sat through the "Christmas Sweater" show, though, might have identified better with the man's original impulse. But in the theater where I watched the program, on the top floor of a high-end shopping mall near the D.C.-Maryland border, there weren't that many viewers to see it all go down. Beck simulcast his little pageant from a packed house in lower Manhattan, but 15 minutes before showtime in D.C., there were only 10 people in the audience with me. The crowd didn't grow much by the end of the night, either. The theater told me they sold fewer than 30 tickets, at $20 a pop. (That turned out to be the rule rather than the exception, according to anecdotal reports of small crowds all over.)

The show got started with some weird, spacey music, as if Beck was trying to prepare his audience for an alien invasion. Then the host took the stage (accompanied by a mostly black choir singing Christmas carols). Signs for Napa Auto Parts, the program's sponsor, hung incongruously in the wings, visible whenever the camera shot Beck from the side. "Two years ago, I wrote a book called 'The Christmas Sweater' because I knew that a storm was coming," he said. What inspired him to write the novel was a memory of his own storm. One Christmas, back before he became a Mormon and got sober, Beck found himself drunk, depressed and too broke to shop for his kids' presents anywhere but at CVS. "I felt like a loser," he said, tears welling up in his eyes.

Those tears would turn out to be the leitmotif of the night, especially once the replay of last year's show got going. Acting, à la Glenn Beck, apparently consists mostly of choking up -- with sadness, with rage, with fright, with anything. The staging of his performance didn't help, either. Wearing a microphone taped to his head and at least three T-shirts (all of which he wound up sweating through by the end of the show), Beck stood in front of six video monitors, which flashed images and colors to help suggest scenes. An orchestra played along from the side of the stage. Beck played every character in the show -- from Eddie, the little boy who's clearly supposed to be Beck, to his mother and grandparents, to Russell, the story's Jesus figure. (Because what good is a Christmas story without a Jesus figure?)

The plot goes like this. Eddie's father has died, which we learned, in the stage version, through a hokey series of voice-overs, and his mom is struggling to pay the bills and raise Eddie. Though Eddie has his heart set on a shiny, red bike with a black leather banana seat for Christmas, his mom can't afford it, and she knits him a sweater instead. He freaks out and throws it on the floor of his room, saying it's itchy and he doesn't like it. They go visit Eddie's grandparents, and Eddie sulks the whole night. Instead of staying over on their farm, he makes Mom drive him back home through the snow. He falls asleep in the car. So does Mom! They crash, she dies, he goes to live with Grandma and Grandpa.

Then things start to lose the narrative thread a little bit. Feeling sorry for himself -- understandably, you'd think, since he's now a 12-year-old orphan -- Eddie lashes out at his grandparents, too. His life's been spiraling out of control; first his dad died of cancer, then his mom died in a wreck, and to top it all off, he never got the bike he wanted! So it's no wonder he starts hanging out next door, at an apparently abandoned farmhouse where he meets the mysterious Russell (whom Beck played with an exaggerated farmhand voice that he'd rip a liberal for using to mock hardworking Americans). Russell tells Eddie he has only himself to blame for his problems. So he gets back to sulking. Eventually, Eddie discovers that he was going to get that bike on the night his mom died, but his grandfather had hidden it to give to him the next day; when Eddie demanded to go home, he missed his chance to get it. He winds up taking it from the barn and fleeing the farm. Then he gets lost in a cornfield, the bike breaks down, and a massive metaphor -- er, storm -- blows up the road. Suddenly Russell appears out of nowhere, telling him he's got to weather the storm if he wants to get home. "Eddie, don't fear the storm," Russell says. "Fear the cornfield, don't fear the storm." Wise words, indeed. With more tears, some prayers and some repentance, Eddie survives the storm. Russell shows him around a heavenly meadow, and tells him his parents are there watching over him. Then Russell starts glowing white, and tells Eddie, "You are joy, Eddie! You are joy!" before turning into pure light. Eddie collapses, then wakes up ... back home at his grandparents' farm -- with Mom there! His sorrow has given him a second chance to go back and stop being such an ungrateful brat about the sweater. And everyone lives happily ever after.

For what's supposed to be an inspiration, the story is pretty dark. (Dark enough, in fact, that the children's version of the book, which came out this fall, ditches just about every part of the tale except that Eddie wanted a bike and got a sweater instead.) Some of it is based on his own life -- his mother did die when he was a teenager, though his father didn't, and he grew up relatively poor, like Eddie in the story. Beck's "acting" didn't help lighten the mood much; when he wasn't sobbing, he was practically screaming with resentment, turning lines that only needed a hint of sarcasm into sneers of outrage. At the climactic moment when the storm passes over Eddie, Beck collapsed into a fetal ball on the stage, crying into his hands, while a woman sang a hymn. The handful of people in the theater with me laughed at a few of his corny jokes, but mostly they sat there, silent and impassive, as the show dragged on for more than 90 minutes.

But as hokey and melodramatic as the staging of the novel was, the special added feature for this year's performance was worse. First, we watched Beck start to cry all over again, just remembering how sad it was for him to do the show the year before. Then, Beck's producers sent out four people who personified the themes of the book: a woman whose daughter had died in a car crash; a junkie, whose family rescued him from drugged-out despair; a woman who survived breast cancer in part because someone gave her a copy of Beck's novel during her chemotherapy; and the would-be suicide, who chose life because of Beck's dulcet voice on the radio.

"There is a storm in each of us," Beck said. "A storm is coming. We're all beginning to see it form."

That line woke me from the semi-stupor the show had put me in, because it was the first thing Beck had said all night that bore any resemblance to the deranged, paranoid conspiracy theorist on Fox News. Call Beck crazy, call him dangerous, but when he talks politics, no one could ever call him boring. When he's telling Christmas stories full of pathos and melodrama, though, he's excruciatingly dull. The strange voices weren't enough to overcome the overwrought narrative or the heavy-handed morals in the tale. There wasn't enough of the weirdness, the mania that drives Beck when he talks about how ACORN or SEIU are out to steal the country, or how all of President Obama's advisors are Maoist thugs. Even Beck's crying -- an over-the-top bit of preposterousness on the TV show -- got stale.

By the time Beck finished showing little videos introducing his guests, featuring epigrams from the novel that made clear how their story related to his, there wasn't much time to talk to them. He got them all to agree that life is very hard, and we all have storms to pass through. "I want a T-shirt that says, 'I survived 2009,'" he said.

And then he started talking about Tiger Woods, of all things. "He's a pretty good golfer, man, he's the best anybody has ever been at that," he said. "That's his job -- to play golf. And he's got half a billion dollars for playing golf. He's got a yacht, he's got multiple houses. He's -- well, he had a car, that's a fixer-upper at this point. He married a Swedish supermodel. And somehow or another, he was still empty inside." Tiger's story, apparently, was just another piece of Beck's. "Find out how to fill that emptiness, and it ain't with stuff," Beck said. "You can either be a victim, or a victor."

The choir sang us out of the theater, a little dazed, two and a quarter hours after the show had started. The few other people in the audience had loved it. "It was a great spiritual message, you know? Inspirational," said Barry Taylor, a professional magician -- yes, really -- from Rockville, Md., who watches Beck on TV and decided to come see the show after hearing him promote it endlessly for the last few weeks. "I've got a lot of shows coming up -- I'll be infused with just a positive energy."

It didn't take long for the theater to empty out. Beck is rerunning the whole thing again in a week, but the employees at the cinema seemed glad to get back to the usual fare in Theater One -- "The Twilight Saga: New Moon." Maybe next year, Beck can add a few vampires to the program. Sweaters alone, it seems, aren't quite enough to draw a crowd.

Olbermann's anger would have seemed a whole lot more sincere, though, if it weren't so transparently hypocritical.

Earlier in the same show, Olbermann had interviewed Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., who got some unwanted attention late last month for an appearance he'd made on a conspiracist radio show, during which he'd called a former lobbyist a "K Street whore." Of course, Grayson wasn't on "Countdown" to talk about that -- he was there for a friendly, even fawning interview about his proposal to change the number of senators needed to overcome a filibuster to 55. He never got the "Worst Person in the World" award for his comments, either.

This wasn't the first time in November that Grayson had been on "Countdown." His comment hit the news on Oct. 27; that night, Olbermann hosted his show, but didn't criticize the congressman. Then the host went on vacation for a few nights; his first night back, Nov. 2, he had Grayson on. Again, it wasn't to talk about his having called a political opponent a whore, but for another friendly interview.

To paraphrase Olbermann himself: A woman was called a prostitute, and -- apparently because the man doing the namecalling was on his side -- he's OK with that.

 

You get the drift. There are vast, sinister and -- most important -- vaguely specified forces out there, about which you should feel massive unease. But don’t fear, America. Beck has a plan. In fact, he has The Plan. He’s assembling a team of advisors (not to run for president, he makes clear), and he’s reading up. Explains Beck:

Here’s how it’s going to work: I’ve done a lot of reading on history in the last few years. And I was amazed to find that what we’re experiencing now is really a ticking time bomb that they designed about a hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Progressive Movement. And they thought, if we just do this, and this, and this and this, over time, if we do it in both the Republican and Democratic parties, we will have our socialist utopia. Well, I say again, two can play at that game. I am drafting plans now to bring us back to an America that our founders would understand … We need to start thinking like the Chinese. I am developing a 100-year plan for America. We will plant this idea and it will sprout roots.

Apparently, Beck is going to hold seven rallies around the country, where he’ll impart the lessons he’s learned about history and policy. “You’re going to learn about history, you’re going to learn about finance, you’re going to learn about community organizing … And then, come August 28 -- I would like you to make your plans now, to join me at the feet of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, DC… We’re going to Washington together, where I will outline the steps that we need to take.”

OK, so it seems like Beck did hold out on his fans in one big way. I’ve now watched the speech all the way through, and it’s not at all clear what The Plan is. Keep listening to Beck until next summer apparently, and then there’s a new Plan.

This is pretty basic out-of-power movement stuff. MoveOn.org and Democracy for America spent the Bush years holding activist training meetings and rallies also. What’s interesting here is how badly Beck wants to think in continents and feel in centuries, rather than the grubby, day-to-day, unexciting facts of real-world politics. He’s identified a purely imaginary, epic-scale villain, and is pitching his otherwise kind of run-of-the-mill activist exercise as correspondingly high drama. Beck sees a dictator and his unthinking followers on the left, and wants to respond with an instructional national meeting where he can “outline the steps that we need to take.”

Also, just to be clear: If you're the person who told Beck about the 100-year socialist takeover plan, President Obama is very upset with you. Way to ruin it for everyone.

"Beck has acted as a 'fearmonger-in-chief,' raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government [which] if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts," the ADL wrote.

Amazingly, just after the ADL report's release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as "bold, clever, and very, very, very effective."

Effective at what, exactly?

Earlier this week, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post detailed several instances in which Beck has welcomed onto his shows guests with ties to groups that traffic in white supremacy, neo-Confederate secession, and anti-Semitism. Stein's reporting was a good start, but it would take a chalkboard the size of Idaho to fully map out Beck's racially paranoid guest list.

But Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he's not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it's best to ask a dog.

I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country's leading "Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival." But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.

Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don't like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.

On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn't a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke's Web site and Stormfront, Beck's July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a "deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture" was met with attention and appreciation.

Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. "A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society," Duke noted. "Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him ... White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms."

Beck's charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin's "useful idiot." But some of Stormfront's most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.

"Glen [sic] Beck can be useful," said one frequent Stormfront contributor who posts under the name SS_marching. "When Glen beck said 'Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People' he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such."

Stormfront member PowerCommander agreed. Beck, he wrote:

"seems to have ignited a flame under the asses of some folks with similar ideas by pushing the right buttons. It appears as if the current regime [is] directly blaming GB and fox news for throwing a wrench in their machine. Is Beck's rambling getting America fired up and ready to fight? Has Beck told enough of the truth to start something bigger? Even an engine needs a starter to get fired off and go down the road."

Thor357, a Stormfront sustaining member who has posted on the site more than 3,500 times, had this to say:

"Glenn Beck and Alex Jones [a controversial conservative media figure who believes 9/11 was an inside job] are the front line in the war of Ideals we grapple with, they are far from perfect and are somewhat compromised. But every person in the last 2 years that I have introduced to the WN [White Nationalist] Philosophy have come largely from Alex Jones, Glen Beck and the Scriptures for America founder Pastor Pete Peters ... Baby steps are required for people like these, but the trio Beck, Jones, Peters are the baby food that feeds potential Nationalists… Glenn Beck is not far behind as his Mormon background indicates to me as most Mormons I have met are not friends of Jews like the Church was years ago. Most Mormons I know are arming themselves, with guns, bullets and food."

Later in the same discussion thread, Thor357 added:

"I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it's amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them. If out of 100 of the Glen Beckers I keep 20 then I have won 20 more to cover my back side. I never lost the 80 as they never were."

Carolina Patriot, whose member picture features a kitten aiming an assassin's rifle, was conflicted but admiring:

"Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I'll turn over to Glenn Beck if he's on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show idea's"

UstashaNY offered up an analogy to substance abuse, with Beck as the soft-stuff hook:

"Beck, Dobbs etc. are like gateway drugs. If it wakes up one person to learn something about whats really going on and that person does the research, looks deeper and deeper into WHO and WHAT is behind all of this, then its a win for the movement. NOBODY in the msm is reporting the stuff Beck does, let him keep talking. It will wake people up, believe me… He is more of a help to us then you may think. Until we have a REAL voice in the msm, guys like him and Dobbs are a stepping stone right into our laps. Its only a matter of time..."

Even those who don't think Beck understands what he’s doing appreciate his instincts. According to WhiteManMarchesOn88:

"There is no doubt that Beck is not a WN [white nationalist], but I have to agree that he does raise a lot of really good questions that do promote White survival. I'm sure he would go a lot farther with a lot of his questions, but ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government] would more than likely kick him off television if he did."

ZOG or no ZOG, Beck is clearly doing something right from the point of view of the average white nationalist.

"By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok," wrote Stormfront member QHelios. "He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that."