Beck's Soros smear machine relies on inaccurate, discredited book

Written by David Shere

Published

In tonight's paranoia-palooza, Glenn Beck leaned heavily on David Horowitz and Richard Poe's book The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party, for source material. When this book came out four years ago Media Matters responded with a thorough debunking. The book uses doctored and distorted quotes to smear Soros and progressives and rehashes a litany of tired, old accusations and nonsensical, paranoid delusions.

At various points throughout tonight's show, Beck cites The Shadow Party and features clips of an interview with Poe:

RICHARD POE: He said it himself on many occasions. He said, “What I have done in other countries, in terms of overturning bad government, I'm going to do in this country.”

[...]

POE: He created his own party within a party, or his shadow party outside of the Democratic Party, the Center for American Progress. That was one of the original shadow-party groups. This group from the beginning was charged with getting control of the conservative media. Many of the people in the Obama administration were just drawn right up from there.

[...]

BECK: Soros' goal for achieving globalization is done through organizations -- puppet organizations -- and he remains in the shadow. He's able to pull the strings because he's the money that animates each of these puppets. According to Shadow Party author Richard Poe, he wrote, “Through his global web of Open Society Institutes and Open Society Foundations, Soros has spent 25 years recruiting, training, indoctrinating, and installing a network of loyal operatives in 50 countries, placing them in positions of influence and in power in media, government, finance, and academia.”

[...]

POE: Soros himself admits that from the time he was very young, he had megalomaniacal ideas. He said he had messianic fantasies. He said he even thought of himself as a kind of god.

[...]

POE: He's even said that, “Now that I've made these things -- these dreams into a reality, I feel more comfortable admitting to the magnitude of my, you know, my ambitions.”

[...]

POE: Soros goes further in that he has said that he wants to be the conscience of the world. He was quoted by his biographer, Kaufman.

Richard Poe and David Horowitz have a long history of misleading, false, and downright whacky accusations against Soros and other figures on the left like Hillary Clinton. It's no surprise that Beck would dip into this well of crazy for source material.