Skousen, W

also cleon
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</div><div>see mark</div><div>
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</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?521801-5/the-making-modern-economics">https://www.c-span.org/video/?521801-5/the-making-modern-economics</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div>the Making of Modern Economics</div><div>Author and FreedomFest founder Mark Skousen talked about the latest edition of his book, The Making of Modern Economics. This interview was conducted at FreedomFest, an annual libertarian conference held this year in Las Vegas.</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div></div>=
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/belief/what-link-between-oregon-militiamen-and-mormonism">http://www.alternet.org/belief/what-link-between-oregon-militiamen-and-mormonism</a>

On the afternoon of Tuesday the 26th of January, LaVoy Fincum, a

rancher from Mohave County, Arizona, was shot and killed by law

enforcement officers. It happened on Highway 395 in Oregon after he and

other members of an armed right-wing group were subject to a police

stop. They were on their way to try to spread their mission of

resistance to the U.S. government to neighbouring counties. On the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdn7NkiGfds">video</a>

released late on Thursday by the FBI, we can see the action as captured

by a drone overhead. In the final moments of his life, Finicum attempts

to avoid police by driving a car  — containing three other members of

the group they called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom —  into a

roadside snow drift. He emerges from the suddenly stationary

vehicle with his hands outstretched, and appears to talk to the two

state police officers trying to apprehend him with their guns drawn.

Then he reaches for his pocket, where he has a loaded pistol, according

to law enforcement. He is immediately shot by one of the officers, and

falls to the ground. We see a 55-year-old family man, who has had ample time to think, make a conscious choice to throw his life away. In many ways, <a href="http://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/burns-occupier-lavoy-finicum/">Finicum</a>

was the philosopher of the group. He acted as a spokesman, and pushed

their stark constitutional originalism in media appearances and press

conferences.The conspiracy theorists in the broader patriot

movement are already working on the ambiguities that the footage - any

footage - makes available to the paranoid. But Finicum’s choice to die

is in keeping with what he repeatedly told me and other journalists

during the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.Time

and again, he said that liberty was more important than life. That

despite missing his ranch and his family, he would rather die than go to

prison. What is capable of turning a grievance over grazing

rights into a matter of life and death? When do political beliefs become

something one is prepared to both kill and die for?The first

clue is in what Finicum shared with the Bundys at the Refuge, and with

their father Cliven at home in Nevada. They were all members of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and all from a corner of

the country with a habit of departing from the respectable path the

church’s hierarchy has been charting for more than a century.The

second are the pocket Constitutions the group ostentatiously carried

around from the first morning of their stay. One the surface those were

simply underscoring the occupiers’ claims that in their alleged

persecution of Dwight and Steven Hammond - local ranchers sent back to

prison for arson on federal property - and their general management of

public land, the federal government was acting unconstitutionally. Courtney

Campbell, a professor of religion at Oregon State University, says that

in part, “Why these protestors are carrying around the constitution is

that they do feel their constitutional rights to freedom of religion and

association, to due process and the law have been violated by the

government.”But these are not any old constitutions. They are

editions published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies,

founded by W. Cleon Skousen, who like the Bundy family and Finicum, was a

member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If you order

in bulk, you can get them for as little 35 cents apiece. Skousen’s

editions pair the text of the constitution - which many Mormons believe

to be divinely inspired - with highly selective quotes from the

founding fathers, with the intention of persuadine readers that the

republic was a Christian enterprise from the outset, and was part of a

divine promise. Skousen

- who died in 2006 at the age of 92 - was a popular, prolific writer

who had stints in the FBI and as Salt Lake City police chief. He was

also one of the most prominent and influential ultraconservative

political activists  in mid-century America, inspiring the John Birch

Society’s febrile brand of anticommunist conspiracy thinking.He

insisted - at the height of the Cold War - that various government

agencies were riddled with Communist infiltrators, and that this put

America in existential danger. In books like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Political-Freedom-Series-Volume/dp/148267789X">The Naked Communist</a>,

first published in 1958, Skousen gave a lurid picture of the degree to

which communists were embedded in public life, their tactics and what he

saw as the godless nihilism of their world view. More conciliatory

foreign policy, divorce law reform and campaigns against school prayer

were just some of his examples of communists working toward the

subversion of American life.  But Skousen was also a deeply

involved Latter-Day Saint, serving for a time as a professor at Brigham

Young University. Seth Payne, a former Mormon who began researching LDS

conspiracy beliefs at Harvard Divinity School, explains that “when

Skousen would talk to LDS audiences about these subjects he would bring

in the religious element. He would describe these conspiracies as

‘secret combinations’. Secret combinations are not just criminal gangs

or people looking for power. At the root of secret combinations is a

Satanic influence.” He was able to find support for these claims in the LDS church’s central text, the Book of Mormon.When

LDS founder and prophet Joseph Smith was assembling his prophetic book

in the late 1820s - supposedly as a translation of golden plates left

for the purpose by the angel Moroni - he incorporated elements of all

the popular enthusiasms swirling around in upstate New York, where he

was then living. His testament purported to tell the story of ancient

inhabitants of the Americas who were descendents of the tribes of

Israel, and who were visited by the risen Christ. But in a sense it was

very much a book of its time. It reflects Protestant revivalism,

Israelism (the idea, popular in the 19th century that certain peoples,

or groups were descended from the lost tribes of Israel), occultism and

folk religion, and then-current anti-Masonic ideas. Payne

explains that while Smith did not specifically call out Masons, he used

“secret combinations” as a familiar euphemism for Masonic activity. In

the Book, “secret combinations” of satanic conspirators brought about

the end of the Jeredites and the Nephites, two of the civilizations the

book describes. These were working in the interests of “Satan’s

plan.” In Mormon theology, the conflict between this and God’s plan goes

back to the beginning of time. While Lucifer wanted humans to be

compelled to be obedient to God so they would be guaranteed a return to

heaven, God wanted humans to be able to freely choose, so they would

benefit from their time on earth. In this way, Payne says, the

Book of Mormon melds “classical Liberal thought with religious thought -

the Protestant ethic and Protestant theology of the early 19th century -

so tightly so that there really is no separation.” Liberal individual

autonomy is a gift from God, and compelled behavior - even if it results

in good deeds - is worthless for salvation, and even an artefact of the

devil’s continuing effort to erode the power of human will. Anti-Masonic

enthusiasms are long-forgotten, but the idea of secret combinations

carrying out Satan’s plan is very much alive. In a <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%5C_id=2466603">paper</a>,

Payne explains that “modern LDS conservatives tend to view any

government action which compels behavior — even if that behavior is

moral and productive — as being a version of Satan’s original plan to

force God’s children to do good.”That’s

why many conservative Mormons, even those who would stop short at

actions like those that the Bundys have taken, are bitterly opposed to

welfare and other government programs that have a benevolent purpose. In

Skousen’s thought, this all mapped neatly onto his anticommunist zeal.

He was faced, he thought, with “secret combinations” of communist

infiltrators, and socialist schemes were not just politically

disagreeable, but setbacks in “a cosmic battle going on where Satan is

trying to infringe on individual liberty or state sovereignty.”Except

among conservative Mormons, Skousen’s influence faded long before the

end of the cold war. Then Glenn Beck—another conspiratorially inclined,

conservative Mormon—reintroduced it to a broader audience late last

decade, <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705292222/Becks-backing-bumps-Skousen-book-to-top.html?pg=all">managing to lift books</a> like The 5000 Year Leap

back onto the bestseller lists. Beck managed to recast Skousen’s

thought to cast suspicion on the ambitions of President Obama, in

particular, his plans to deliver universal health care. Payne

says, “Glenn Beck reintroduced Skousen’s ideas—his anticommunism and

fears about sovereignty —to a broader community. That resonates with

people who think that the president is a communist.”Meanwhile,

other Mormon conspiracists like Joel Skousen, nephew of Cleon, continue

all the while to push the idea of secret combinations in the service of

Satan’s plan, which was now identified less with communism than the

institution of a single world government under the control of

“globalists." In one sense, this bears similarities to the conspiracy

ideas of essentially secular figures like Alex Jones. There's enough

common ground for Joel Skousen—also an icon of the prepper movement—to

have appeared several times on Jones’ radio program. But the

distinctive spiritual dimension of LDS-derived conspiracism raises the

stakes for a segment of ulturaconservative Mormons. For some, like the

Bundy group, such ideas are a stimulus to radical action. Disaffection

with federal government agencies is widespread throughout the western

interior. Whether it is the festering issue of grazing rights, and

perceptions that the BLM is antagonistic toward ranchers, or the feeling

that conservation of native species like <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/travel/2015/mar/17/wolves-eastern-oregon-return-home">wolves</a> or the spotted owl is taking precedence over ranchers’ interests, the emerging “<a href="https://www.hcn.org/topics/sagebrush-rebellion">sagebrush rebellion</a>” takes in a lot of actors and sympathizers who are not Mormons. But

like the vast majority of conservative Mormons, very few ranchers have

shown themselves willing to carry out armed occupations of federal

buildings. The resurgent militia and <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement">sovereign citizen movements</a> have beliefs

that overlap with the more religiously inclined conspiracists, They

also fear world government and federal government tyranny, espouse an

eccentric form of constitutional originalism, try to reassert local and

state jurisdiction over federal land, and are prepared to use tactics of

harrassment and intimidation, as they’ve shown in Harney County. But

even those who had been cooperating with the Bundys in organizing

locals in opposition to the reimprisonment of Steven and Dwight Hammond

were appalled in the early days of the occupation that the Bundy group

had departed from a longer plan and involved the federal government. And

in this circumstance, none have shown that they are willing to die. In

explaining Finicum’s actions, we need to take into account his

particular form of radically ultraconservative Mormon belief. As Payne

says, “for a believing Latter-Day Saint who takes these things

seriously, they aren’t just looking at some political machinations for

money and power, they’re looking at an eternal cosmic struggle that’s

been going on since the beginning of time.”The Bundys—and

Finicum—see themselves as “soldiers in this resistance against not just

political tyranny but also Satanic tyranny.” This belief may be

reflected even in the names they have been given and chosen. Ammon

Bundy’s first name comes from an important <a href="https://www.lds.org/manual/book-of-mormon-stories/chapter-23-ammon-a-great-servant?lang=eng">personage</a>

in the book of Mormon—a warrior who spreads God’s word to unbelievers.

The scriptural Ammon, Campbell says, “provides a model for the sort of

person who stands up to oppression and unjust governments, resists and

prevails.”Campbell also points out that Finicum made veiled

references to “the Title of Liberty,” a story from the Book of Mormon in

which <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain%5C_Moroni">Captain Moroni</a>

of the Nephites “in the face of of a government that’s become

tyrannical, individuals and their communities need to stand up for their

liberty, their religion, and their land.” Another of the occupiers,

Dylan Anderson, used Captain Moroni as his alias when talking to

reporters.Other references to Mormon lore came before the

occupation, such as in a video where Bundy said that the constitution

was “hanging by a thread," an allusion to the so-called White Horse

Prophecy, in which Joseph Smith reportedly predicted that a time would

come when Mormons would have to restore constitutional government.Payne

points out that there are serious dounts as to whether Joseph Smith

ever said such a thing, and that it comes from secondhand accounts of

his remarks by followers. The LDS church itself felt bound to say that

the prophecy “has not been substantiated by <a href="http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/blog/church-statement-on-white-horse-prophecy-and-political-neutrality">historical research</a>”

after Mormon politicians like Orrin Hatch and Rex Rammel referred to it

in the early years of the Obama administration. “It’s an urban legend, a

folk myth.” Nevertheless, over the years “it has taken hold in the LDS

community; even in mainstream LDS you’ll hear that phrase used.”People

like the Bundys and Finicum, “take that phrase and see themselves as

elders of Israel who are going to save the Constitution.”What is one man’s life in the face of such a cause, and such a danger?The LDS church was quick to <a href="http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/church-responds-to-inquiries-regarding-oregon-armed-occupation">disown</a>

the occupation and the Bundys' actions. In 2012, sensing a growing wave

of Skousenite Mormon activity, LDS Church Elder Apostle Dallin Oaks <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwGji7hQYqM">warned against</a>

“the influence of right-wing groups who mistakenly apply prophecies

about the last days to promote efforts to form paramilitary or other

organizations… The leaders of the church have always taught that we

should observe the law and we should not try to substitute our own

organizations for the political and military authorities put in place by

constitutional government and processes. We counsel against joining or

supporting paramilitary organizations.”No doubt this reflects the

sincere disapproval of the vast majority of Mormons, even

conservatives. And the Bundys represent a significant departure from the

teachings of the church, according to Campbell. “They really emphasize

that there needs to be obedience to the laws of the land. Even if

there’s some kind of injustice that’s occurred, you don’t take over

property, you don’t take over land.”Actions like these also

imperil the respectability Mormons have worked so hard to maintain from

the beginning of the 20th century. In the 19th century, they came into

open conflict with the federal government. First, in the 1850s, over

their own territorial ambitions and a perception that the Utah Territory

under Prophet Brigham Young was in <a href="http://http://www.historynet.com/utah-war-us-government-versus-mormon-settlers.htm">insurrection</a>. And later, in the 1890s, as they were forced to give up the practice of polygamy. Payne

explains that rebellions such as the Malheur occupation are

embarrassing to the church hierarchy and many ordinary Mormons, since

they “harken back to a period that most Mormons are embarrassed about

from time to time—those days of conflict with the federal government and

the American society as a whole.”The Utah/Arizona/Nevada

tri-state area, where the Bundys and Finicum are from, has been a

reliable source of such embarrassments. Northern Arizona was the

long-time locale for the polygamist holdouts of the Fundamentalist

Church of Latter Day Saints under Warren Jeffs. Not far away in Nevada,

the <a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2016/01/post%5C_229.html">Bundy ranch standoff</a> provided the immediate precursor for the occupation just ended.People

in such areas of the American West are culturally isolated, even from

the moderating influences of contemporary Mormon practice.“It’s

certainly peculiar to areas in the western United States that are

difficult to get to because they’re mountainous or arid,” Campbell says

of these fundamentalist currents. “They’ve been historically bypassed by

other people as they migrated to western Oregon or California. As a

result there has been a tradition of anti-government

anti-authoritarianism, where a person is accountable to God and not to

civil authority.” LaVoy Finicum clearly had a lot to lose: his

ranch, his family, his life. But by melding his political beliefs with

cosmic struggle, by embracing a tendentious reading of scripture and

prophecy, by viewing those he disagreed with not just as political

adversaries but as agents of the devil, Finicum turned a cause into a

death wish.

=

<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/mitt-romney-video-wythe-glenn-beck-cleon-skousen">http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/10/mitt-romney-video-wythe-glenn-beck-cleon-skousen</a>
==

<h3>Conspiracy theories</h3>

Much of Beck's promotion of conspiracy theories and views on race can

be attributed to his admitted ideological debt owed to Cleon Skousen, a

controversial and discredited Mormon anti-communist "historian,"

far-right speaker, author and racist.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">[16]</a>

Skousen authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red

Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon

end-times prophecy.<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">[16]</a>

A former FBI clerk, fired chief of police, and Brigham Young

University teacher, Skousen was disavowed or disowned by nearly every

organization he was affiliated with, including the FBI, the city where

he served as chief of police, the American Security Council, and the

Mormon church. On the subject of Skousen's anti-communist scholarship a

1962 FBI memo said "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated

himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are

promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes" and

Skousen's "The Naked Communist, ... another example of why a sound,

scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">[16]</a>

In September 2007, a year after Skousen's death, Beck began touting

Skousen's book "The 5,000 Year Leap" on his radio and television shows,

through his websites and at his speaking engagements. The 5,000 Year

Leap is Skousen's attempt to "explain American history through an

unspoken lens of Mormon theology." Going beyond mere endorsement, Beck

played a central role in seeing a new edition published, and wrote the

foreward for the edition, writing "I beg you to read this book filled

with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired." In

Beck's announcement of introducing the 912 Project he called for all

912 members to buy the book, saying "The first thing you could do," he

said, "is get 'The 5,000 Year Leap.' Over my book or anything else, get

'The 5,000 Year Leap.' You can probably find it in the book section of

GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing:

Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all

about. 'The 5,000 Year Leap' is the first part of that. Because it will

help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of

becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year." The

result was that more than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first

half of 2009. The book's publisher says Beck "has done more to bring the

work of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America

today."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">[16]</a>

Another of Skousen's works, a slavery revisionist history titled "The

Making of America" is the subject of daylong seminars to 912 chapters

conducted by Dr. Earl Taylor Jr. president of the National Center for

Constitutional Studies, which was founded by Skousen. Salon described it

as "filled with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized

African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave

owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system" and Skousen as "a

right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised."<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">[16]</a><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Glenn_Beck#cite_note-salon_skousen-15" title="">---</a><h2 class="entry-title headline lg" data-href="/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/singleton" data-rel="bookmark" data-title="Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life"><a rel="bookmark" title="Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life" href="http://www.salon.com/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/singleton">Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck’s life</a></h2>

    
                 </font><h3 class="deck"><font size="5" face="Times New Roman">Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him</font></h3><font size="5" face="Times New Roman">
                </font><div class="meta clearfix">
      
         <font size="5" face="Times New Roman"><span class="byline">By <a href="http://www.salon.com/writer/alexander_zaitchik/">Alexander Zaitchik</a></span><br /><br /></font><p><font size="5" face="Times New Roman">On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with America’s new breed of angry

conservative. Up to 75,000 protesters had gathered in Washington on

Sept. 12, the day after the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center

attacks, sporting the now familiar tea-bagger accoutrements of “Don’t

Tread on Me” T-shirts, Revolutionary War outfits and Obama-the-Joker

placards. The male-skewing, nearly all-white throng had come to denounce

the president and what they believe is his communist-fascist agenda.Even

if the turnout wasn’t the 2 million that some conservatives tried,

briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the

Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain

of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it.

The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of

the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago

to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day

after the towers fell. <div style="display: block;" id="fold-2021158" class="hidden">In

reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man

who changed Beck’s life, and that helps explain why the movement is not

the nonpartisan lovefest that <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM4xqnukQrM&feature=player_embedded">Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears.</a>

Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid

Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most

susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric

distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they

are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer

and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.”

A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even

for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has

now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him

to a receptive new audience.Anyone who has followed Beck will

recognize the book’s title. Beck has been furiously promoting “The 5,000

Year Leap” for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he

launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of “The 5,000 Year

Leap,” complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn

Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top

15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for

months. The book tops Beck’s 912 Project “required reading” list, and is

routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use

it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in

Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall,

available for the 912 nice price of $15. “Don’t bother trying to get it

at the library,” one 912er told me. “The wait list is 40 deep.”What

has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981,

is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain

American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such,

it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to

rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a

Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding

Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists

inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S.

Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law,

and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and

radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs —

based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke,

Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more

God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of

every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it

was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full

of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative

religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been

part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (a<a target="_blank" href="http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/article_2d6d1183-1c51-5242-bb76-684b1f385573.html">nd where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser</a>).But

more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more

revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is

the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a

player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the

republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J.

Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that

eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age

of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the

foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions

of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.skousen2000.com/all.htm">Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets</a>

on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing,

and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to

explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months,

which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully

coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests

that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange

place.- – - – - – - – - – - -Willard Cleon Skousen was

born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in

Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he

remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon

missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior

college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked

briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with

the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in

His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in

nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.After retiring

from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young

University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a

tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his

tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing

Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city’s

ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive

zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their

cards. “Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the

same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote

to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of

half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar.

He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public

funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City

government.”During his stint as police chief, Skousen began

laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional

anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called

“The Naked Communist.” In the late ’50s, America’s far right began to

bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the

Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch

Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia.

Members of these groups were the original postwar “domestic right-wing

extremist threat.” Then as now, they were very much on the government’s

radar.After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a

star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both

the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s

Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing

ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and

domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds

grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend

and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are

largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up

emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country

and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.” How did Skousen

become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do,

that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also

boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are

open to question. Skousen’s work at the Bureau was largely

administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of

the far right who has examined <a target="_blank" href="http://ernie1241.googlepages.com/skousen">Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file</a>.

“Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he

never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,”

says Lazar.Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained

researching “The Naked Communist.” But this research was as shaky as his

résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was

the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen,

Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan

Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched

uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country,

sometimes giving five speeches a day.When Skousen’s books started

popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school

board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The

Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI

memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself

with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting

their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The

Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a

sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”Two

years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned

with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based

far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here’s how Time

magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature <a target="_blank" href="http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,895749-4,00.html">on what it called the “rightwing ultras”:</a><blockquote>

The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its

guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W.

Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the

anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job

as Salt Lake City’s police chief (“He operated the police department

like a Gestapo,” says Salt Lake City’s conservative Mayor J. Bracken

Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The

Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of

the State Department.

</blockquote>By 1963, Skousen’s extremism was costing him. No

conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted

anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American

Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had “gone off the

deep end.” One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott,

the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen “money

mad … totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own

personal ends.”When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch’s

charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the

Communist conspiracy,” the last of Skousen’s dwindling corporate clients

dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a

statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from “any

individual or party” that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a

pamphlet titled <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ourrepubliconline.com/OurRepublic/Article/27">“The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,”</a> was the nation’s most prominent Birch defender.Skousen

laid low for much of the ’60s. But he reemerged at the end of the

decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with

right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the “dynastic rich.” <a target="_blank" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iYM28mRuxY&feature=related">Families like the Rockefellers</a>

and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces — from Ho

Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement — to serve their own

power.In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty

mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time.

The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll

Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen

inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and

embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the

details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO).

Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a

breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly

40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO

conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes <a target="_blank" href="http://www.joelskousen.com/">Skousen’s nephew Joel</a>).In

“The Naked Communist,” Skousen had argued that the communists wanted

power for their own reasons. In “The Naked Capitalist,” Skousen argued

that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who

used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The

purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on

Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push “U.S. foreign policy

toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society.” Skousen

claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of

such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated

this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named

Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a

pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English

translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”“The Naked

Capitalist” does not seem like a text that would be part of the required

reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors

taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of

Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope”

author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his

work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named

Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. <a target="_blank" href="http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm4/page_text.php?CISOROOT=/dialogue&CISOPTR=3884&CISOBOX=1&OBJ=3956&ITEM=121">Their judgment was not kind</a>.

In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused

Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far

beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things

that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what

actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists

like Willard Cleon Skousen.“Skousen’s personal position,” wrote a

dismayed Quigley, “seems to me perilously close to the ‘exclusive

uniformity’ which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this

country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point

plan.”Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman

Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the

super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The

institute later changed its name to the National Center for

Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues

to publish Skousen’s books, including Glenn Beck’s favorite work of

history, “The 5,000 Year Leap.”)By the end of the 1970s, the

death of Skousen’s biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy

cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mormoncurtain.com/topic_stevebenson_section3.html#pub_289504316">LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order</a>

to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating “no announcements should

be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that

are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain

that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise

such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what

is said during such lectures.”Skousen may have been too extreme

for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found

rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan’s Washington. In

1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National

Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious

conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new

administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by

becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also

formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned

the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.“Skousen worked

to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an

evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity,” says Rob Lauer, a

leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. “By arguing that biblical

principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those

most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right

political establishment over the past 25 years.” In 1981,

Skousen published “The 5,000 Year Leap,” the book for which, thanks to

Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn’t that Skousen book that made

the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan’s second

term, Skousen became the center of <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/16/us/bicentennial-panel-in-california-assailed-over-racist-textbook.html">a minor controversy</a>

when state legislators in California approved the official use of

another of his books, the 1982 history text “The Making of America.”

Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen’s book characterized

African-American children as “pickaninnies” and described American slave

owners as the “worst victims” of the slavery system. Quoting the

historian Fred Albert Shannon, “The Making of America” explained that

“[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the

presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it

necessary for them all to go in chains.”Skousen spent the 1990s

in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and

welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley

Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon

circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed

tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.- – - – - – - – - – - -Glenn

Beck’s first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have

occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, “The Real America,” was a

chapter titled “The Enemy Within.” It consisted of a list titled

“Communist Goals of 1963.” The list was originally published in

Skousen’s 1958 book “The Naked Communist,” and was submitted to the

Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck

identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of “The Real America” to

ponder Skousen’s list, then “check off” those goals already achieved by

America’s new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck’s view:

“liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU.”It would be

another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen’s

books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck’s sent him “The

5,000 Year Leap.” In the column linked here, <a target="_blank" href="http://communities.canada.com/calgaryherald/blogs/hannaford/archive/2009/05/11/the-5000-year-leap.aspx">Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer.</a>

Paul Skousen, Skousen’s son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon

by e-mail, without giving dates: “As I understand it, Glenn Beck was

given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly

the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been

trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make

sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he

began mentioning it on his show.”Whatever the circumstances, Beck

really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first

brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck’s radio show is

Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed

conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/2071/">“Have you ever read any Skousen?</a>

Have you read — do you remember ‘The Naked Communist’? I went back and

reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You

look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It’s all

been done.” Horowitz agreed.The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck’s radio program and received the same question. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/1513/">“Are you familiar with Skousen?” asked Beck</a>.

When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. “He’s fantastic,” he said. “I

went back and I read ‘The Naked Communist’ and at the end of that

Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won’t be able to find the

truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won’t be in

print anymore. So you must collect those books. It’s an idea I read

from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, ‘The Naked Communist,’

and where he talked about someday the history of this country’s going to

be lost because it’s going to be hijacked by intellectuals and

communists and everything else. And I think we’re there.”Beck

continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession

really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before

Obama’s inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen

at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama

took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a “September

twelfth person.”“The first thing you could do,” he said, “is get

‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’ Over my book or anything else, get ‘The 5,000

Year Leap.’ You can probably find it in the book section of

GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing:

Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all

about. ‘The 5,000 Year Leap’ is the first part of that. Because it will

help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of

becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year.”By

then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired

demand. “We as a family,” Paul Skousen told Salon, “were preparing to

publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that

Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that.

That is the version we’re now publishing.According to James Pratt

of PowerThink Publishing, publishers of the new 30th anniversary

edition of “Leap,” which has the Beck foreword,  it was intended to

replace the version that the Beck show was already touting via links on

its Web site. Pratt claimed in an e-mail to Salon that the previous

version was not authorized by the family. “It was presumed by Mr. Beck

and staff that copyright authority was in effect with that edition, and

as an author I must say, I had also assumed the same thing … I was more

than a little surprised this was going on, to the tune of hundreds of

thousands of copies.”PowerThink secured the agreement of the

Skousen family to create the current edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,”

which was first published on March 1, 2009. Pratt says that a federal

lawsuit “is in process, to secure the copyright authority in an

‘authoritative’ way” to stop anyone but PowerThink from publishing the

book.In March, with the new book available, Beck invited

Skousen’s nephew Mark onto his Fox show, where the two men discussed

splitting up the United States. (Mark would later say that between

commercials, Beck told him that a friend had sent him “Leap” and that

the book “changed his life.”) A week later, Beck issued his famously

maudlin announcement introducing the 912 Project. The teary-eyed

performance was accompanied by a clarion call for all 912ers to buy ”

Leap.” “I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I

can only describe as divinely inspired,” wrote Beck in his introduction

to a recent edition. The result has been a publishing earthquake: More

than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first half of 2009. James

Pratt, the book’s publisher, says Beck “has done more to bring the work

of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America today.”“The

5,000 Year Leap” is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the

912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional

Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering

daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen’s “Making of America.”

For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about

America’s religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor’s

“Making of America” seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the

Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen’s book is “considered a great

masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the ‘granddaddy’ of all

books on the United States Constitution.”Like so much declaimed

by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last

statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In

coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous

relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson

grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Fantasies can have serious

consequences.
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