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struggles? He seems to feel his honesty about personal struggles gives him moral authority—and immunity to whatever else might be alleged about him. “I will always tell you the truth, even when it hurts me personally,” he told his Fox viewers. By contrast, he said, “The left has already doctored photos, documents, Web sites, which frankly only dishonored them and hurt my children. But as I said to my kids this week, there’s more to come.”
    Beck said those words in early September 2009. Soon after, he took legal action to shut down a Web site called GlennBeckRapedAndMurderedAYoungGirlIn1990.com . The site was a tasteless spoof of Beck’s spurious style of attack: Broadcast an outrageous allegation, qualify it by saying “I’m just asking the question,” and then assume it to be true because the victim of the attack doesn’t deny it. The joke was that if Beck refused to deny that he had raped and murdered a young girl twenty years ago, then, according to Beck’s own formula, it must be true.
    Beck, departing from his usual sense of self-awareness, filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization—an agency of the United Nations, which Beck routinely demonizes as part of a world-government conspiracy. The conspiratorial UN body ruled (naturally) against Beck and in favor of the man who set up the spoof Web site, Florida computer programmer Isaac Eiland-Hall.
    Having made his point—and, as a bonus, having lured Beck into acknowledging the authority of the United Nations—the satirist let Beck have the domain name.

CHAPTER 3
THE WHITE HORSE PROPHECY

    In one of his first appearances on Fox News—two months before he would start his own show—Glenn Beck sent a coded message to the nation’s six million Mormons—or at least those Mormons who believe in what the Latter-day Saints call “the White Horse Prophecy.”
    “We are at the place where the Constitution hangs in the balance,” Beck told Bill O’Reilly on November 14, 2008, just after Obama’s election. “I feel the Constitution is hanging in the balance right now, hanging by a thread unless the good Americans wake up.”
    The Constitution is hanging by a thread .
    Most Americans would have heard this as just another bit of overblown commentary and thought nothing more of it. But to those familiar with the White Horse Prophecy, it was an unmistakable signal.
    The phrase is often attributed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon Church. Smith is believed to have said in 1840 that when the Constitution hangs by a thread, elders of the Mormon Church will step in to save the country.
    “When the Constitution of the United States hangs, as it were, upon a single thread, they will have to call for the ‘Mormon’ Elders to save it from utter destruction; and they will step forth and do it,” Brigham Young, Smith’s successor as head of the church, wrote in 1855.
    Was it just a coincidence in wording, or was Beck, a 1999 Mormon convert, speaking in coded language about the need to fulfill the Mormon prophecy? A conversation on Beck’s radio show ten days earlier would seem to rule out coincidence. Beck was interviewing Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, also a Mormon, when he said: “I heard Barack Obama talk about the Constitution and I thought, we are at the point or we are very near the point where our Constitution is hanging by a thread.”
    “Well, let me tell you something,” Hatch responded. “I believe the Constitution is hanging by a thread.”
    Days after Beck’s Fox show started in January 2009, he had Hatch on, and again prompted him: “I believe our Constitution hangs by a thread.”
    Hatch concurred.
    Large numbers of Mormons watch Beck, but likely an even larger number of his viewers and radio listeners are evangelical Protestants who have no idea that Beck is preaching to them nightly the theology of the Latter-day Saints.
    * * *
    There is no way to know