When Glenn Beck moved his media operation to Dallas in 2012, Texas solidified its reputation as America’s one-stop shop for fevered conspiracy theories. Our state’s passion for believing that small groups of rich, powerful men rule the world (a belief often held by other rich, powerful men) reached a high-water mark in the days leading up to November 22, 1963, when paranoid rantings about communism, the United Nations, and the Catholic Church poisoned the air of Dallas. But it survives today, in former congressman Ron Paul’s tirades against the Federal Reserve, in Austin radio host Alex Jones’s warnings about the Rockefellers and the Illuminati, and now in Beck’s baroque stories about “Crime Inc.,” a collection of progressive forces including George Soros, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Goldman Sachs, and Fannie Mae that is supposedly intent on transforming and plundering our country. Texas is a big state, but it may not be big enough to hold both Jones and Beck, whose shticks overlap and who have made a habit of denouncing each other. Jones, in particular, has been adamant in his insistence that Beck has stolen his ideas and used them to help the “globalist” enemy. But just how similar is their rhetoric? Well, it depends.
