Sociologist Peter Morton
Filed by Max Canning:
“This has been an incredibly disturbing experience for me,” said Peter Morton, a.k.a. “Glenn Beck.” On Sunday, Morton revealed in a press conference and Q&A with reporters that he is a sociology professor at the
“I cannot continue the charade any longer,” a visibly shaken and broken Morton read from a prepared statement. “This has gotten way out of hand. I started this experiment ten years ago with honest intentions, to test the credulity of the American public, and to try to gain a deeper understanding of the political psychology of the American people. Today, my experiment ends, and my search for a therapist begins.”
Morton said his experiment commenced in 2000, when he used his connections in the radio industry to secure an afternoon show on WFLA in
When the Glenn Beck Program premiered in 2000, Morton espoused moderately conservative views. However, as time progressed, Morton said he realized that in order to maintain ratings that would keep him on the air, he would have to “up the ante.” Gradually, Morton went from a reasonable but obscure radio show host to a right-wing fringe figure broadcast over 280 stations nationwide by 2008.
“This endeavor was only supposed to last six months, a year, tops. I was planning on losing money because I was funding it myself,” said Morton. “The next thing I knew, I was making millions of dollars for saying the craziest stuff I could possibly think of. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I had never done so little actual work in my life and here I was raking in more money than I had ever seen. But on the other hand, it was frightening to know that there was such a huge market for this. And then HLN called me one day asking if I’d want to host a TV show. A TV show!”
Morton hosted Glenn Beck on HLN for two and a half years before signing a deal with Fox News. He hosted his first show on the network on
Within a year, Morton’s excitement was tempered by the stark realization that his insane rants had actually been resonating with millions of people. “I was trying to get fired,” confessed Morton. “But no matter what I did or said, my ratings just kept going up and up. I thought shedding what were obviously fake tears time and again over 9/11 would do it, but people just ate it up. And then I got the idea to start insinuating that Obama was in league with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. And I thought that would do me in for sure. I mean, we all know how conservatives reacted to people who called Bush ‘Hitler.’ But as you know, not only did I not get fired, my ratings went even higher. You should see the emails I received, thanking me for telling the truth and exposing the Nazi-Stalinist, ACORN-orchestrated plot to destroy
Morton continued, “Then I figured, you know, I’ll just go off the deep end. I’ll just directly attack the half-white, half-black president and call him a racist, which makes no sense whatsoever, but I wanted out of there. It was becoming too much. It was a really daunting task coming up with new red meat conspiracy theories to toss to the viewers. Over the summer I was really grasping at straws with the FEMA camp thing. So I went on Fox & Friends one morning and said something about how this president has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, and that he’s a racist. Don’t ask me what I meant by ‘white culture’ because I didn’t mean anything by it. There is a French culture. A Norwegian culture. An Italian culture. But there is no universal ‘white culture.’ It’s a meaningless term.”
“Well, there was a backlash from liberals, but my bosses at Fox just doubled down even after a several companies pulled their ads from my show. The next thing I knew I was being contacted by Goldline International to hawk precious metals. And I thought, ‘My audience can’t buy gold. They’re not rich.’ But then I realized I could cross the ethics line by plugging gold on my show while simultaneously advertising for Goldline on my free time. When that didn’t get me fired, I decided I had had enough. So here I am today.”
Morton also offered insights into media personalities he encountered during the experiment. “When I was at HLN, I ran into Nancy Grace in the hallways a few times. She’s an incredibly disturbed individual. Maybe bipolar, I don’t know. She’s obsessed with dead, missing, and battered white kids. Once, about two hours before her air time, she was in a panic because a missing kid she had planned on talking about turned up in his parents’ house. He was just hiding. So she was in her office hunched over her computer looking for news about victimized children. I tried to help. I said, ‘Well Nancy, a little girl got kidnapped today in New York.’ Her eyes lit up. She said, ‘Where?’ and I said, ‘Harlem.’ Then she just frowned and went back to her computer.”
Morton also discussed some of the personalities at Fox News, at one point calling Bill O’Reilly a “schoolyard bully” who’s “probably a sexual deviant.” When asked to clarify, Morton responded, “Have you read Those Who Trespass? I wouldn’t have read it, but one day he handed me a copy and said he wanted to know what I thought. It was the worst thing I’ve ever read in my life. Worse than the loofah affidavit.”
About Sean Hannity, Morton said, “Hannity was by far the worst. He’s not conservative. He’s not liberal. He’s not anything. He’s just for whatever the Republican Party is for, and against whatever the Republican Party is against. He’s like a member of the politburo. I don’t think he’s ever had an independent thought in his life.”
“By the way,” Morton added, “Ann Coulter is a guy.”
Conspicuously absent from Morton’s prepared remarks at the press conference was any mention of “Glenn Beck’s” 9/12 project—a mass gathering of disaffected Americans who last summer protested nonexistent tax hikes and other vague ideas such as “spending.” One reporter, however, did inquire about that momentous event in Washington last September.
“Yeah,” said Morton. “I’m not proud of that, but I wanted to see how many people I could get to physically show up at a specific place and time. It’s one thing to get millions of people to tune into your show from the comfort of their homes and cars, but the 9/12 project was designed specifically to see how many people would jump when I said to jump. A lot of people were wondering why I didn’t show up to my own march in D.C. The reason is that it just would’ve been too much. I did not want to see what I had created. I did not want to have to give a rousing and insincere speech. I did not want to see the rotten fruits of my deceitful labor.”
“I need a drink.”
Morton’s book, The Mass Psychology of Stupid will be available sometime in the fall.
- Max
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