Beck Does Civil Rights Movement

BECK FLIPS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT ON ITS HEAD: On his Fox News show earlier this month, Beck claimed that the civil rights movement "has been co-opted by progressives." As Media Matters has noted, Beck's claim rings hollow. Beck has repeatedly appropriated the imagery and rhetoric of the civil rights movement to support his own causes. After citing Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "real reformer" on his April 9, 2010 radio show, Beck declared of his hard right movement, "I have to tell you, I wouldn't be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn't be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, some of us go to jail, just like Martin Luther King did, on trumped-up charges." "We are the inheritors and protectors of the civil rights movement," said Beck on another broadcast. As Zaitchik points out, Beck's twin embrace of Cleon Skousen and Martin Luther King, Jr. is exceedingly ironic because Skousen and his allies like Ezra Taft Benson were "were of course anti-civil rights." In his biography of Beck, Zaitchik explains how "the second-generation of Skousens and Bensons...ran the Utah Birch Society and used it to create panic over civil rights, in one case by spreading rumors that blacks from Los Angeles were marching on Salt Lake City with plans to riot. The National Guard actually had to be called out." Beck claims now to understand and embody the civil rights movement, but as Zaitchik told the Washington Post's David Weigel, Beck has "a complete ignorance of black history and culture."