As Media Matters has documented, Glenn Beck has offered wild speculation and conspiracy theories in response to the protests in Egypt. In a column for The Weekly Standard, editor and Fox News contributor William Kristol criticizes Beck for his “hysteria” and attacks other conservatives for being “so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats.”

From Kristol's column:

Now, people are more than entitled to their own opinions of how best to accomplish that democratic end. And it's a sign of health that a political and intellectual movement does not respond to a complicated set of developments with one voice.

But hysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it's a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition.

Via Politico's Ben Smith.

UPDATE:

On NRO's The Corner, National Review editor and Fox News contributor Rich Lowry sides with Kristol, writing that he “takes a well-deserved shot at Glenn Beck's latest wild theorizing.”