In case you hadn't noticed, I'm on something of a Cleon Skousen kick. Skousen, for those who aren't aware, was an ultra-conservative whackadoodle who spent his glory days in the '60s and '70s traversing the fringes of the radical right loudly denouncing the communist conspiracy to take over America, warning of the much larger capitalist-communist conspiracy to take over the world, and approvingly quoting historians who thought that white slave owners got the raw end of the slavery deal. Accordingly, his theories and writings have been tossed into history's Dumpster.

So why all the scrutiny?

Because Glenn Beck dove deep into that Dumpster and fished Skousen out. Beck loves the guy.

“Divinely inspired” is how Beck refers to Skousen's writings, which he hawks as part of his 9-12 Project. Beck also talks Skousen with the guests on his TV and radio programs, asking them if they're on board with the man's sermonizing. In that spirit, it's worth taking a look at who, exactly, Glenn Beck is recommending to his followers.

I've been reading Skousen's The Naked Capitalist, which details the existence of an all-powerful “Establishment” of super-wealthy capitalists-cum-communists who are enacting their centuries-old secret plan to dominate the planet. It's scintillating stuff, it gets crazier by the page, and some pages are so loony as to merit reproduction, as is the case with pages 98-99, in which Cleon Skousen addresses the assassination of John F. Kennedy:

In 1963 the Left-wing forces induced President Kennedy to recommend the passage of a whole series of hard-core socialist proposals and these were soon dumped into the hoppers of Congress. However, there were sufficient Americans awake at the grass-roots level to protest against these measures and demand that Congress reject them. That is what happened. Even under Presidential pressure the Democratic-dominated Congress refused to pass these bills. The frustrated Establishment press turned the heat on Congress but to no avail. By September the prestige of President Kennedy had taken a serious drop in Establishment circles and there was some question as to what might happen if JFK decided to seek a second term. Then suddenly, on November 22, President Kennedy was assassinated by a Marxist revolutionary, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was connected with Castro's main Communist front-organization here in the United States.

Under the emotional shock of this tragic event, the Establishment realized the nation might react politically and demand that the whole Soviet-Communist apparatus be outlawed. Establishment spokesmen such as Earl Warren immediately blamed the President's murder on the “Radical Right,” but when the arrest of Oswald revealed that it had been done by the Radical Left, the Left-wing machinery went into high gear to assure the American people that Oswald could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be part of an international Communist plot. He must be accepted as merely an isolated psychopathic individual who acted on his own initiative. To prevent any independent investigation by anti-Communist Democrats and Republicans, the Communist Daily Worker suggested that President Johnson appoint a special commission to do the investigating with Earl Warren as chairman. Four days later that was precisely what President Johnson did. The real story of the Kennedy assassination was soon buried beneath an Establishment-supervised white-wash designed to pacify the American people.

To recap: JFK was assassinated as part of a Communist conspiracy that may have been tied to the “Establishment,” which subsequently covered up this conspiracy by having the Daily Worker instruct Lyndon Johnson to have Earl Warren “white-wash” the “real story” of the assassination.

And remember, the “Establishment” did this in order to preserve the “Soviet-Communist apparatus.”

And don't forget, this is Glenn Beck's favorite scholar.