I almost agreed to do a piece about Glenn Beck for the next issue of the magazine, but in the end I begged off. I just couldn’t do it. The tipping point came a week after I’d said I’d do it, when I was in a bookstore and decided that if I was going to do a Beck piece, then I guess I’d better read his latest book. So I took a copy off the shelf and started browsing. And the pit in my stomach grew. I just couldn’t dive down that rabbit hole for the next month.
Besides, I was also halfway convinced that Beck had also reached a tipping point and might very well have imploded completely by the time the magazine hit the newsstands. In the New Republic today, James 
Downie recounts Beck’s steep decline in the ratings and suggests that the implosion might have happened already:
Beck, says [biographer Alexander] Zaitchik, was caught “in a vicious circle”: To keep viewers coming back, he had to keep creating new, more intricate theories. Last November, in a two-part special that indirectly invoked anti-Semitism, he accused liberal Jewish financier George Soros of orchestrating the fall of foreign governments for financial gain. During the Egyptian Revolution, Beck sided with Hosni Mubarak, alleging that his fall was “controlled by the socialist communists and the Muslim Brotherhood.” Beck is now warning viewers not to use Google, accusing the search-engine giant of “being deep in bed with the government.” In recent months, it seems, Beck’s theories became so outlandish that even conservatives—both viewers and media personalities—were having a hard time stomaching them. Now, each new idea appears to be costing Beck both eyeballs and credibility. “At some point,” says Boehlert, “it doesn’t add up any more.”
I caught a few minutes of Beck’s show yesterday for the first time in a while, and he was rattling on about…..Van Jones. Jesus. Surely he’s milked that dry even for an audience as credulous as his? And that’s his problem. He either replays his greatest hits over and over, which starts to get preposterous even for his biggest fans, who must have an increasingly hard time believing that Van Jones is literally at the center of all that’s wrong with the world. Or he creates ever more convoluted alternate universes that are not just harder to follow, but are also increasingly hard to believe for an audience that basically just wants to hear that Barack Obama is Satan. There’s really no way off this carousel.
