Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

• • •

To his lowlife friends and followers the man across the desk was known simply as George, in a thinly veiled reference to the father of our country. In his younger days, however, the full four names had often graced his mug shots on law enforcement bulletin boards in various jurisdictions. He’d been christened at birth in loving tribute to George Lincoln Rockwell, the mid-twentieth-century mastermind of the American Nazi Party. Legend had it that he was conceived at the moment of his namesake’s friendly-fire assassination in 1967, though some of his faithful went so far as to claim he’d been secretly sired by the homeland Führer himself.

The Pierce tribe had grown large and dispersed over many generations, blown across the country like carnival trash on closing day. It’s hard to put down roots when getting run out of town is the most celebrated tradition of your kin. Their ragbag family tree was hung with an assortment of thieves, thugs, grifters, Klansmen, and other such stellar representatives of the Übermensch.

From a home base in the row-house slums of East Baltimore, young George had accompanied his parents on caravan tours of tent shows and soapbox rallies. In town after town he’d watched and learned as they spouted a bizarre mélange of Bible-bending apocalyptic foolishness and race-baiting bull-roar. At age fifteen he was old enough to take up the pulpit himself, and this proved to be a turning point. Where Mom and Dad had enjoyed only limited appeal even with like-minded audiences, George showed an uncanny knack for drawing larger and larger crowds and filling the collection plates to overflowing.

He soon left home and took his own brand of revival show on the road, drumming up support, gathering disciples, and hawking self-published white-power pamphlets and paperbacks along the way. Back then the regional press gave him plenty of ink because most people really loved to hate him. But some, it seemed, just loved him; the more he was denounced and banned the more popular he became. His litany of run-ins with the law became a test case for the limits of the First Amendment, and with every arrest more anonymous money would pour in for his defense. He even ran for a seat in the state legislature at one point, and to the horror of the good people of Louisiana, he’d very nearly won.

It was only a decade later, though, with the explosion of the online social media revolution, that George Pierce graduated into a full-fledged underground phenomenon. In this new medium he enjoyed an advantage the old-school KKK leaders never had—no sheets or hoods were required for membership. His followers never even needed to step out of their homes to meet and plan and join in the crusade. Instead they hid behind members-only firewalls, closed forums, and scary nicknames, safe and secure in the anonymous darker corners of the Internet.

As Pierce’s underground white-nationalist movement began to gather strength, the FBI added an alias to his criminal profile. In their internal alerts and briefings they called him the General, and by the look of things he’d now taken that rank to heart.

Grave times can bring out the best in good people, and open the door to all manner of evils for the rest. In the recent turbulent years Pierce had read the tea leaves and transformed himself, at least to the uninitiated, into a grassroots champion for the downtrodden majority. He’d retooled his public messages to be more appealing to a growing audience of hopeless and disillusioned Americans. He’d temporarily put aside his radical pose, in other words, for the sake of his radical ends. To the flocks of newcomers he presented himself as a simple man with plainspoken, commonsense answers to the troubles of a changing world.

All the pus and poison still festered at the core, though, waiting for its time. A day finally comes when the old hatreds begin to rise again and the enemy can be named, and in his twisted end-times gospel that day was dawning soon. George Lincoln Rockwell Pierce had a long list of enemies ready for indictment, trial, and punishment at his hands.

• • •

“Miss Ross?”

She’d heard the closing amen but hadn’t spoken it herself. It was Pierce who’d addressed her with a subtle testiness, the headmaster calling out a promising student caught daydreaming in class.

“Yes?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t make yourself a part of our prayer just now.”

“That’s right.”

“And why is that?”

“I prayed earlier,” Molly said.

“Ah.”

In the ominous silence that followed she heard a match scrape and flare, then the distinctive sounds and scents of a third-rate cigar being lit and drawn upon.

“You rescued us today,” Molly said, “and I was grateful for it.” She turned her head and raised her voice slightly. “Thank you. I want to say that up front, to all of you here.”

“And we all appreciate that expression of your gratitude,” Pierce said, “tardy though it may be. I for one had begun to wonder—”

She turned back to the sound of his voice. “What I don’t understand is why a man like you would stick his neck out for people like us.”

“People like you?”

“Yes. People like us. People who’ve clearly and repeatedly condemned every single thing you stand for.”

The room became somewhat restless, particularly toward the back, as her last words hung in the air. After a series of sharp raps on the desk—did he actually have a gavel over there?—the scattered muttering died down right away.

“Oh,” Pierce said quietly, “surely you don’t condemn everything we stand for, Molly. May I call you Molly?”

“Sure.”

“Far from everything, Molly.” A creaking of old wood and springs arose as he stood. By the sound she could tell that someone stationed behind him had slid his chair back, butler-style, to allow the great man adequate space for an anticipated oration. “All of us here have sworn to uphold the divinely inspired U.S. Constitution,” Pierce said, “to the letter, as it was originally written and intended. We stand for American interests to be first and foremost in our foreign policies. We oppose globalism. We believe this country has the right and the obligation to secure its borders, its sacred heritage, and its values. We believe that American jobs, American ingenuity, and American resources must be protected and preserved for the good of the American people. We believe that the blame for our economic woes, past and present, lies with that incestuous den of thieves and shylocks in the revolving door between Washington, Wall Street, and the Federal Reserve. And we believe in a small and constrained federal government, with its inevitable corruption confined within the limited role set out for it by the Founding Fathers—”

“All due respect, Mr. Pierce,” she said, “the few things we might happen to agree on are far outweighed by everything else. On which we don’t.”

“I met your late mother once, Molly, may God rest her soul. And I’m not surprised to learn that the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.” This was obviously spoken for the benefit of the others in the room, and his crowd responded with tentative laughter.

Having grown up as a drifter Pierce never acquired a legitimate regional accent of his own. In his recorded speeches and videos, however, he had a way of mimicking the native dialect of his varied audiences. Hack politicians often engage in such faked familiarity in an attempt to ingratiate themselves to different ethnic or cultural groups while stumping on the campaign trail. Presumably on her behalf, he’d begun to shade his words with a generic cornpone twang that no true southerner, much less a real Tennessean, would ever mistake for authentic.