How Glenn Beck’s Conspiracy Theories Are Born

As we have noted before, one of the great ironies of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze network is that it operates under the slogan “Truth Lives Here” when Beck himself is one of the most recklessly dishonest media voices in operation today.

And nothing better demonstrates this fact than his current obsession with the story, broken by the SPLC, of Ayo Kimathi, a Department of Homeland Security employee who runs a racist, anti-gay black nationalist website on the side where he openly proclaims that “we are going to have to kill a lot of whites.”

That story is outrageous enough on its own, but for Beck it is just further proof of his theory that the Obama administration is seeking to foment a race war, and he is now tying this story to the ongoing rightwing conspiracy claiming that the government is stockpiling weapons and ammunition for use against American citizens.

Despite the fact that both the original SPLC piece and Beck’s own article report that “Kimathi is a small business specialist” with DHS, on his radio show today Beck baselessly proclaimed that Kimathi “was in charge of buying all of the bullets for the Department of Homeland Security.”

“So the shortage of bullets that we have,” Beck stated, “may very well be caused by this guy. The reason you don’t have bullets is because this guy … is in charge of all of the procurement of the bullets and the weapons for the Department of Homeland Security.”

Kimathi’s actual job, contrary to Beck’s false claim, is as a “Small Business Specialist, who serves as a point of contact for private firms seeking agency-specific acquisition information” … but Beck doesn’t care about the truth at all, and instead is using this as further evidence that “our administration is in bed with very bad people”:

Just keep this in mind the next time Beck starts to wonder why everyone calls him a crazed conspiracy theorist.