Glenn Beck: The Communist Conspiracy

Glenn Beck says 350.org is part of a communist plot
by Bill McKibben

Say this for Glenn Beck: He works fast. Less than 48 hours after we at 350.org launched our campaign to let businesses say that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce doesn't represent them, Beck hit back. A true friend of Chamber (here's a picture of him broadcasting from the group's roof -- certainly worth the $10,000 he donated from his $32 million annual earnings), he put little old 350.org up on his notorious board Friday night next to a hammer and sickle. We were part of a communistic conspiracy that also included the Apollo Alliance and the Service Employees International Union.


In some sense, I guess, this pleased us. Right back to J. Edgar Hoover and his attacks on Martin Luther King, "communist" has always been the epithet of choice for any organizers who've shown signs of being effective. (Tea Partiers are obviously chagrined that actual working people in Wisconsin are upstaging them.) In another sense, it's just sad: Confronted with the hard choices posed by physics and chemistry, Beck (like too many others) tries to find some specter to blame.

But it's not worth getting mad about. Better to point out that there's something ... funny about Beck.

Hence this little essay I wrote for The Washington Post:

My life as a communist actually began without
me knowing it, on Friday evening, when Glenn Beck
spent his program explaining about a "communistic"
conspiracy that included 10 groups in America.
One was 350.org, a global campaign to fight climate
change that I helped found three years ago. He even
put our logo up on his whiteboard -- and next to it a
hammer and sickle.

Since I don't actually watch Mr. Beck, I didn't
know about it until e-mails began to arrive,
informing me that indeed I was a communist.
My first reaction was: I'm not a communist.
I'm a Methodist.

But then I reconsidered. What exactly was
I doing when those e-mails arrived? I was
downloading an iPad app, At Bat 11, which lets
me (for only $14.99) hear the broadcast of any
baseball game anywhere in the country. Since
I live in New England, I use it to track our
beloved Boston squad, whose moniker I had
never before deeply contemplated. Now --
well, enough said.

And the next morning, on my first full day as
a communist? I spent most of it outdoors, at the
annual New England festival for young cross-country
ski racers. More than 500 kids from across the region
were competing, and I was standing on the toughest hill
cheering. And here's the thing -- at least with the first-
and second-graders, I was cheering for everyone equally.
Not only that, but did you know where this particular
type of skiing was invented? Norway.

Some people laugh at Mr. Beck
-- earlier in the same week,
for instance, he'd ventured the opinion that "Reformed Judaism"
was pretty much the same as Islamic extremism.
Not 100 percent correct, but the next day he apologized,
and explained the research technique that had led to the
slight miss: "I had, was having a conversation with a few
friends the night before -- one of them, I trust on things like
this, and I'm not even sure if I misunderstood him, or
misheard him, or what." In my case, though, the evidence
seemed fairly damning.

Especially because, earlier in the week, I'd
written a
widely circulated essay that attacked the U.S. Chamber
of Commerce, which on its own website says that as
"the voice of business, the Chamber's core purpose is to
fight for free enterprise." And yet I scourged the group --
because it's spent the past few years opposing any action
on climate change. Indeed, it submitted a petition to
the Environmental Protection Agency arguing that the
agency should avoid regulating carbon emissions because,
in the event of global warming, "populations can acclimatize
to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological,
and technological adaptations."

To me that sounds absurd. Instead of the 16 companies
that provided more than half the chamber's budget
adapting their business models to a world of safe
renewable energy, they wished all people everywhere
and forever to change their physiologies. But now I see
that my protests can be read as a gesture of support for
human solidarity, with all that implies.

I should have known better
than to go after the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce. After all, Mr. Beck just
last year held a telethon on its behalf, encouraging
listeners to send the chamber checks, and ponying up
$10,000 of his own $32 million in earnings.
"They are us," he'd explained -- and indeed, an
executive of the chamber called in to thank him.

The Chamber of
Commerce spends more money than
anyone else lobbying Congress. It dropped hundreds
of thousands on the last state elections in Wisconsin,
all of it for the side now standing up for union-busting,
I mean human freedom. Opposing it -- well, clearly I'm
hammer-and-sickle all the way.

I turned 50 last fall -- that's half
a century not
understanding who I really was. There's something
liberating about finding out. After all, it was Marx who
said that above 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, we can't have a planet "similar to that
on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth
is adapted." No, wait, those were NASA scientists.
The same people who faked the moon landing. This is a
complicated world; I'm going back to the baseball game.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books on the environment, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and founder of 350.org. He also serves on Grist’s board of directors.