Glenn Beck has spent most of this week railing against George Soros, including his alleged predilection for overthrowing governments and ranting that he intends to do the same here. Of course, Beck didn't tell you that the governments Soros reportedly played a role in overthrowing were all communist and/or authoritarian and/or deeply corrupt. Nevertheless, Beck wants you to believe that Soros wantonly “collapses regimes” and that America is “his target now.”

Guess who else thinks there's something to fear from Soros' alleged regime-collapsing? Iran.

The New York Times' Robert Mackey writes:

Oddly, Mr. Beck's conspiratorial reading of the recent history of Eastern Europe puts him in complete agreement with Iran's intelligence ministry, which for years has been working to discredit the country's reformist leaders and their calls for fair elections as the puppets of foreign plotters.

Mr. Soros's name was invoked repeatedly during the show trials of opposition figures in Tehran in 2009, following weeks of street protests over the country's disputed presidential election. At his trial, an Iranian academic who once received support from Mr. Soros, Kian Tajbakhsh, claimed, in what appeared to be a forced confession, that the country's former president, Mohammad Khatami, had met with Mr. Soros to plot the overthrow of Iran's Islamic Republic.

Mr. Khatami called the allegation absurd, but, as The Lede explained in a post on "Iran's Fear of a 'Velvet Revolution,'" Iran's intelligence service seems to be obsessed with Mr. Soros. In an animated television program produced by the ministry for Iranian television in 2008, Mr. Soros was imagined conspiring in the White House with Senator McCain, the C.I.A. and Gene Sharp, a proponent of civil disobedience, plotting to overthrow Iran's government with the help of Iranian reformists.

Beck merely has puppets to illustrate his hatred for Soros, but perhaps animation is next on his agenda.

Mackey also further debunks Beck's claim that Soros “helped to engineer coups in Slovakia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia:”

There were also no coups in Slovakia, Croatia or Yugoslavia. Slovakia was created by the so-called "velvet divorce," the peaceful dissolution of the federal state of Czechoslovakia by democratically-elected leaders in 1993; Croatia's wartime president, Franjo Tudjman, an authoritarian former Communist general, died in office in 1999 and was replaced by a former member of his party after a democratic election; Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader who was most responsible for the brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed tens of thousands in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, resigned in 2000, following street protests after his loss in a democratic election.

Mr. Beck's suggestion that these peaceful ends to tyrannical regimes would not have come about without money from foreign plotters ignores strong evidence to the contrary, which suggests that in each case civil society groups, with some moral and financial support from the outside world, led popular uprisings against unpopular authoritarian rulers.

Beck hasn't really explained why he thinks working to overthrow authoritarian regimes is a bad thing. But Beck's fixation on Soros is causing him to fall on the same side as the authoritarians.