Inside the mind of Glenn Beck: Is America headed toward its ‘last exit’?

Glenn Beck swore the wind had never blown so hard at his rural Idaho retreat. The property’s bare flagpole swung from north to south in sync with the dry mountain grass as workers mowed the landscaped lawn set in the pocket of a little-known canyon just north of the Utah border. From the isolated compound, powered by solar panels and connected by three radio towers, Beck broadcasts his program of conservative commentary five days a week, 9 to noon, all summer long before returning to Texas for the fall.
“Standing Rock Ranch,” Beck says, is his calm from the storm.
To enter the recently remodeled ranch house tucked around the bend from his foot-thick security gate, visitors pass below a cow skull and crossbones encircled by deer antlers and topped with a black steel crown — a Wild West slant on a colonial symbol meaning “No King but God.” Once inside the home’s rustic central room, Beck sheds the persona of a multimillionaire media mogul, and assumes the warmth of an earnest museum guide serving as docent to his own self-curated temple to Americana.
“Everything in the house has a story behind it,” Beck tells me. “I mean literally everything.”
His hands hover from one historical icon to the next — Orson Welles’ Spanish typewriter, Rush Limbaugh’s golden EIB microphone, William Tyndale’s New Testament translation, Theodore Roosevelt’s pince-nez eyeglasses — before landing on a yellowed shirt cuff. The deeply creased linen still carries the faded spatter of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Beck paused. The cuff, a relic of a country divided, felt uncomfortably appropriate in this moment 159 years later. Lincoln wore it beneath his second inaugural overcoat embroidered with the motto, “One Country, One Destiny,” the night he was shot. Even when it came to Lincoln, Beck brooded, the art of overcoming division is never so black and white. “You know, he tried, he tried.”
Unlike the artifacts that fill his home, Beck doesn’t expect to be remembered more than three generations from now. The CEO of Mercury Radio Arts and the fourth most-listened-to man on the radio lumps himself in with a lineage of Beck-family “losers,” a tally which he says includes his great-great grandfather, and his great-great grandfather’s brother, both Union soldiers who were quickly captured and placed in the Confederacy’s infamous Andersonville prison; a fact he learned while doing his family history.
But despite his efforts at self-effacement, Beck is the only thing uniting this hodgepodge exhibit of rare religious manuscripts, presidential memorabilia and pop culture souvenirs. Each item in the archive seems to represent a belief, or a hope, or a fear of Beck’s. When the onetime face of Fox News chooses to guide you through the curious conflict of his home, he isn’t just rehearsing his preferred story of America, he is narrating his own.
We’re sitting in Beck’s naturally lit art studio, just off the side of the home’s spacious great room. Fixed to a massive easel is a sketch Beck started the night before, in gray and rust-colored pencil strokes, of a Native American figure looking our way. Staring down at us is the massive head of an extremely rare white bison; sacred, Beck says, to local tribes.
The animal’s cotton-tuft fur mirrors Beck’s trademark hair. From below, its eyes appear squinted, suspicious, subdued. Beck, dressed in moccasins and a loose long-sleeve shirt, seems wary of letting a reporter into his home and definitely burdened by the state of the country. Less than 24 hours earlier a politically motivated gunman had staked out a site on a golf course with apparent intent to kill former President Donald Trump — the second such attempt in as many months. Less than 24 hours before that, Beck was backstage with Trump at a fundraiser in Salt Lake City.
The immediacy of political violence poured a cool shadow over our conversation, punctuating a familiar phrase from Beck. “The Constitution hangs by a thread. Period,” he said. Oscillating, as he has for two decades, between morning zoo theatrics and talk show televangelizing, Beck diagnosed an America rapidly forgetting the principles previous generations died to pass along. Beck’s “calling,” as he put it, is to remind Americans what holds them together by exposing the lies that tear them apart — even if that means undermining confidence in the nation’s institutions.
Only by revealing the rot one limb at a time can the country heal itself, he reasons. But the biopsy is rarely bipartisan. Amid the crescendoing news cycle of the 2024 presidential campaign, there is an undeniable tension between the incentives of online echo chambers and the aspirations of a peacemaker. Beck, at his most candid, sees it too. After pundits like himself have eroded trust in every facet of political life leading up to Nov. 5, what foundation will be left to build on?
For Beck, the question remains an open one.
But sitting an arms length from Beck, whose eyes never break contact except to make a point, I don’t doubt the sincerity of his worry for the country; a permanent wrinkle of concern spans the width of his forehead. While defaulting to cross-legged and casual, Beck frequently jumps to the edge of his seat, his thick index finger accusing the air in front of it of crimes ranging from constitutional illiteracy to sedition. Beck’s frustration peaks as he describes the stakes of this year’s presidential election, “How is this not obvious?” his head shaking in disbelief. “Open your eyes.”
The way Beck sees it, Trump vs. Harris is, without exaggeration, a decision of divine clarity: a choice between “good versus evil,” the Democratic nominee representing censorship of free will against a Republican offering of “the messiness of reality.” Beck’s political pessimism extends far deeper than policy concerns about another Democratic administration, though. Beck thinks the American people care “too much about politics” and “not enough about principles.” The overarching question for Beck is whether Americans want to ditch their 235-year experiment with the Constitution, supplanting a government of the people for that of the global elite. If the 2024 election doesn’t wake people up to that, Beck isn’t sure what will.
“I think our republic is at the last exit,” Beck said. “I could come up with 1,000 ways this thing falls apart. But I can only come up with one way that it sticks together.”
Beck’s answer is a restoration — a restoration of principles founded in faith and the U.S. Constitution. And there was a time when he thought the country might follow his lead.
On Aug. 28, 2010, Beck stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of hundreds of thousands. His 5 p.m. show where he interspersed chalkboard condemnations of Barack Obama with promotions for his 9/12 unity movement was then bringing in more than three million viewers a night. Dressed in a tieless light-blue button-up, folded to the elbows, Beck resembled a high school history teacher more than the Tea Party standard-bearer he was, as he praised his audience for leaving “politics” behind and returning “to the values and the principles that made us great.”
“I testify to you here and now, one man can change the world,” Beck intoned. “And I share with you an equal testimony, that man or woman is you.”
With the country in slow recovery from the 2008 Great Recession, Beck’s emotive defense of American greatness was surprisingly apolitical. The crowd, intentionally gathered on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, wore an abundance of patriotic paraphernalia but partisan signs were sparse. Such a moment of unity, where people embodied their “unum” (one) rather than their “pluribus” (many), had been Beck’s goal, and subsequently became his guiding inspiration. The 2010 Restoring Honor rally was followed by Restoring Courage at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in 2011, Restoring Love at Cowboys Stadium in 2012, and Restoring Hope at Standing Rock Ranch in 2020.
But sitting in his bunkeresque homestead in 2024, Beck describes a country splitting at the seams. Fourteen years ago, there was no talk of drag queen story hour at public libraries. Or sex transition surgeries for minors. Or gender fluidity lessons in elementary school. “I didn’t become radical,” Beck said, leaning closer. “You moved. Not me. You were with me. What changed your mind?”
If the country can no longer agree on the most fundamental questions, Beck wondered, how can it unite around the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
“We’ve got to put our petty differences apart and focus on those things, or we will, as Lincoln said, be torn apart from the inside,” Beck said, pressing the fingers of both hands flat together as if in prayer. “We will fall from the inside.”
In Lincoln’s first major speech, a quarter century before the Civil War, the young state lawmaker feared the unifying story of the American Revolution had been replaced by a populist rage that threatened “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” If a country founded on a principle as pure as freedom could be destroyed, Lincoln said, it would be “by suicide.”
The spirit of Lincoln roams the halls of Standing Rock Ranch. A plaster mold of his face — made shortly before the 1860 GOP presidential nomination — watches over our interview. His portrait, a photograph from just after the nomination, hangs in a restored 140-year-old cabin that sits beside Beck’s home. The doorknob from Lincoln’s law library and the marble nameplate from his original sarcophagus stand out among Beck’s Civil War collectibles. As does the brass key that let Lincoln, and his killer, into Box No. 7 at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865.
Beck’s mementos to the life and death of the “Savior of the Union” are a stark reminder of the cost of unity. Under Lincoln, the Confederates — insurrectionists who had rejected the outcome of Lincoln’s election — were forced to accept a reunion on abolitionist terms. There would be no return to the antebellum status-quo of a country failing to live up to its founding documents. “It was reunification with a kind of revolution in the original understanding of the country,” said Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. But Lincoln’s goal, Holzer said, was always to preserve the principles that would bind America together for generations to come: “The union was holy to him.”
Like Lincoln, Beck sees no return to unity without a revolution of sorts — one without violence because if it “becomes a hot revolution, everyone loses.”
Battle lines in this 21st century fight aren’t drawn between north and south, or left and right — not even between Trump and Kamala Harris. In Beck’s telling, they are drawn between “the people” and “the elites.” The spoils being fought over in this conflict aren’t geographic, they’re epistemic. Who decides what news is displayed by the algorithm? Who determines the consensus view? Who labels mis-, dis- and malinformation? And which unelected bureaucrats decide how these edicts are interpreted?
Welcome to Glenn Beck’s civil war over reality.
At a time when “every truth is holding on by its fingernails,” Beck sees an elite class, once tasked with expounding truth, intent on obfuscating it. He says such institutional failure was exposed in the noble lies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the downplay of risk in transgender treatments for minors, the refusal to call a historic surge in border crossings a crisis, and an eagerness to employ questionable legal strategies to convict a former president. But these efforts, while often coordinated, are no conspiracy, Beck says. Rather, they are the product of open collusion between political leaders, legacy media and global businesses seeking to advance an agenda that lacks public support.
The trend is clear, and more people would see it if the press did its job, Beck tells me. In his most recent book, “Dark Future: Uncovering the Great Reset’s Terrifying Next Phase,” Beck outlines a fourth Industrial Revolution where the confluence of artificial intelligence and centralized internet data enables the rich and powerful to usher in a form of social-credit-score capitalism, where Beck fears outcomes will be forced toward income equity and environmental sustainability instead of shareholder value. Efforts are already underway to enforce this shift via international organizations, Beck believes.
In the final weeks of September, he points out, the United Nations approved greater authority for global governing bodies, including the potential for taxation of high-net-worth individuals around the world.
Beck says he would accept such changes if they were the result of a real shift in public opinion. “If America decided to vote for less freedom … I could live with that. What I can’t live with is the lies.” But when Beck turns on the news of the day, he says lies are all he hears.
“Deception, lies, corruption,” Beck says, are the main instruments of a political establishment hell-bent on keeping Trump’s anti-establishment movement out of power, even if it comes at the expense of their credibility. This conclusion is what turned Beck against the same mainstream media he briefly sought to appease after Trump’s rise within the GOP. And it’s what convinced Beck to support the cause, or maybe more accurately, the character, that co-opted the conservative movement he once embodied.
In 2016, few conservative pundits were more outspoken in their skepticism of Trump than Beck. Beck believed Trump would steamroll limited-government conservatism and said that his norm-breaking approach made him a “dangerous man.” Following Trump’s presidential win, Beck toured main-stream liberal outlets to express his regret at having contributed to an environment of tribal demonization that he believed paved the way for Trump. Beck called for an anti-Trump coalition to stand together on principle and pled with the former subjects of his progressive-skewering radio rants “to not make the same mistake I did.” But in the end, it was these same liberal outlets that pushed Beck to “gladly” vote for Trump four years later.
In 2018 and 2019, Beck took another tour, this time to explain why he changed his mind. At the time, Beck said his flip on Trump had more to do with anger about the wall of institutional opposition that assailed Trump’s presidency than a complete endorsement of his record. While Beck was pleasantly surprised by Trump’s actions on Israel, the border and judicial appointments, it was a single inaccurate news cycle that led him to dramatically don a crimson Make America Great Again cap in a 2018 broadcast. A day earlier many news organizations had reported a Trump statement out of context, suggesting he had called all undocumented migrants “animals,” when he was actually referring to violent Latin American gang members.
When Beck saw what he considered just the latest example of political propaganda masquerading as journalism, he said he’d had enough.
“The media” had finally driven him to do what he had avoided doing for two years amid increasing pressure from his conservative colleagues, to put on “one of these stupid red hats.” Beck came to believe that Trump, or rather the hysterical reaction to him, had removed a curtain concealing the true mission of America’s elite governing class and their friends in the press: not to reflect the people’s will, but to maintain their own status. And that revelation alone, Beck decided, was reason to support the man.
“He’s a human hand grenade,” Beck told me. “He just goes in and starts just pulling at the fabric, and all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, look at what’s happening now.’ That’s who he is.”
Trump’s shameless personality and disregard for process, according to Beck, enabled him to explode the administrative state’s sheetrock of legitimacy and expose its crumbling integrity underneath. Beck recognizes that Trump’s instinct — in some ways pioneered by himself — to throw doubt on entire sectors of American political life, whether it be elections or the intelligence service, has contributed to the nation’s plummeting trust in government. But, he argues, it is the only way to wake people up, take the country back and eventually heal.
Beck lands this point with a metaphor: Imagine you’re sitting in a hospital office. In the corner are two doctors quietly debating whether to tell you the true extent of your terminal cancer prognosis. The only chance of survival lies through a massive, and potentially fatal, surgical procedure to remove the disease. One doctor wants to minimize your condition for fear of causing you to panic. The other doctor chooses to sit you down and explain that the procedure will bring you to the brink of death. But without it, death is a certainty.
It’s a question he says he’s thought about “for a long time” — whether an institutional hand grenade is a suitable means of restoring America’s foundation. But with his “naive cartoon faith in the United States government” now eviscerated, Beck believes we have to rebuild from the bedrock up.
“These institutions are so corrupt; they are riddled with cancer, all of them,” Beck said. Beck has deemed the whole edifice unsound and he is ready to pull the pin on the grenade.
“Any question that somebody says I shouldn’t ask, I’m asking that question. Anybody who says you shouldn’t read this, I’m reading that book,” Beck said.
This reaction can be taken too far, Beck concedes. A single-minded focus on picking apart the establishment can lead to the promotion of bad actors or easily verifiable falsehoods. Two days before we talked, Beck premiered an interview with InfoWars founder Alex Jones to reveal the “untold story” of the conspiracy theorist who now owes $1.5 billion in defamation damages to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims after calling the tragedy a hoax. The decision to host Jones followed from Beck’s belief that “no discussion or debate is unAmerican,” as he wrote in 2009. Beck told his audience he wanted them to see “beyond all the labels” so they could decide for themselves what to think about Jones.
However, in more recent writings, Beck has gone out of his way to distinguish his work from “tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists on the right.” Beck still believes that total skepticism, with “no question out of bounds,” is the only way to approach punditry. But “it must be an honest question.”
“That’s what we’re lacking,” Beck said. “You have a conversation with somebody, usually they’re just trying to win. I’m not trying to win. I want to find the truth.”
Beck recognizes that his endorsee for president in 2024 doesn’t exactly fit this description. The GOP nominee has recently demonstrated his willingness to take an inaccurate claim and run with it as long as it confirms his dystopian take on the Biden-Harris administration. But, Beck says, Trump operates under a different set of expectations compared to truth-seeking institutions like universities and the press. Unlike misleading statements from these sources, Trump’s lies aren’t meant to misdirect, according to Beck. They’re meant to tell you exactly what he thinks. Fundamentally, he, like Beck, is an entertainer.
“To understand Donald Trump, you have to understand he’s a showman first, always has been,” Beck said. “He’s a guy that knows how to draw a crowd.”
In this way, Beck and Trump understand each other, their backgrounds allowing them to approach topics without the trepidation — or safeguards — of established media, and to frame issues in a Manichaean mode that holds an audience. “Because I had the skills of an entertainer,” Beck said, “I knew how to draw a crowd.”
And draw a crowd he did. By 19, Beck was the youngest morning DJ in the country. His blend of Top 40 zaniness and patriotic zeal would later earn him national syndication and stints at CNN, from 2006 to 2008, and Fox News, from 2009 to 2011, where he temporarily boasted the country’s highest share ratings, with viewers tuning in by the millions to his marriage of doomsday monologues and tearful tributes to faith, freedom and unity.
But achieving unity was never quite that simple for Beck the entertainer. According to Beck the tour guide, the paradox is generational.
On the wall behind Beck’s freestanding stone fireplace, just beside the windows of his all-leather workout room, is an original color study of Arnold Friberg’s famous painting of George Washington, “The Prayer at Valley Forge.” Friberg’s final version temporarily hung in Washington’s Mount Vernon estate after being painted in 1975 for America’s bicentennial.
Three years before the country’s 200th birthday, Beck recounts, his parents had proposed rebranding their hometown of Mount Vernon, Washington, as the West’s “colonial village,” complete with new brick facades and Revolutionary War-attire parades. But instead of serving as a rallying cry for the city of less than 15,000, their attempt at revitalizing the community divided residents. Years into his career, Beck saw a parallel in his own efforts to turn the country to its Founding Fathers.
“I realized I think I’m repeating my parents’ life,” Beck said. “I just want to save the country, and somehow or another, I’ve split it in half.”
Longtime conservative commentator Larry Elder remembers one thing standing out from Beck’s time as the king of conservative media. It wasn’t the way he drew thousands to campaign-rally style events, or drove up ratings. It was when he crossed the line from political incorrectness into personal insult, calling Obama “a racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people” during a July 2009 “Fox & Friends” show, according to Elder, who is Black.
After 30 years in radio, Elder knows the difficulty of “competing for eardrums.” His own priorities, in descending order of importance, are to entertain, inform, provoke and uplift. The freedom of radio requires hosts to create self-imposed limits, Elder said, or they risk doing more harm than good.
“If you’re sincere about what you think and what you believe, you’ll have your own restraints,” Elder said.
After Beck left Fox, in what appeared to be a mutual agreement, he launched an ambitious online network, Glenn Beck TV, which later morphed into BlazeTV+. Blaze Media’s subscription-only model has since garnered more than 450,000 subscribers paying more than $100 a year. Beck’s success showed personalities like former Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly there was money to be made in the personal-brand-based business model of the iPhone era, according to The Atlantic reporter McKay Coppins, who also authored Mitt Romney’s biography. But Beck’s success, Coppins said, may also be feeding into the 21st century trend of increasing atomization.
“The less generous way of looking at this model is to say that people are creating smaller echo chambers, incentivizing themselves to tell their audiences what they want to hear,” said Coppins.
Many of Beck’s allies on the right think it is actually this fear of decentralized media that poses the greatest threat to American freedom. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, whose relationship with Beck goes back to his first campaign for Senate, believes the current risk isn’t that Americans become isolated into separate newsrooms, it’s that newsrooms become so ideologically similar that they exclude entire perspectives from their coverage. Beck’s “intellectual curiosity” allows him, and others like Carlson and Kelly, to approach questions “with a greater degree of skepticism of government” than mainstream media, Lee said.
“By breaking off, if nothing else, they’re providing a bulwark against further consolidation that could lead to a further homogenization of viewpoints in the news media that often go unaddressed or overlooked or just not reported on at all,” Lee said.
Media decentralization has also unearthed a new pro-Trump coalition united by their shared commitment to free speech and the Bill of Rights, according to Beck. This unorthodox Justice League of MAGA champions, which includes Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, could very well be on the front lines of the Trump administration’s operation to “go in with a scalpel or a hatchet (to) get that cancer out,” Beck said.
While this iteration of the Republican Party may seem inconsistent with its libertarian leanings of 10 years ago, the central motivation behind Beck’s Tea Party was never cutting taxes, according to Coppins. Like the MAGA movement that came after it, the Tea Party was fundamentally driven by “a deep distrust of the American governing class.” A “reflexive rejection of the Washington consensus” can be healthy, of course, in moderate doses. But if you aren’t careful, Coppins said, skepticism can become the entire substance and goal.
“You end up untethered to reality and willing to just kind of spiral down any conspiracy theorist rabbit hole you can find,” Coppins said, “if it will make your neighbors in Washington, D.C., angry.”
On a Saturday in early September, Beck joined Carlson as his special guest for a sold-out tour stop in Salt Lake City. The pundits, speaking to a crowd of several thousand at the Delta Center, reminisced about their former influence at CNN and Fox News — “When I was at Fox, it was like you could feel the White House move,” Beck said — and questioned the circumstances surrounding the nearly-successful assassination attempt against Trump in July.
Beck called the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt a government operation, stating, “They tried to kill the president of the United States.” Beck and Carlson agreed the Biden administration had “allowed it to happen.”
This inclination to question everything was the foundation of Beck’s faith journey before it was the fuel for his political one. Nearly two decades earlier, Beck stood on the stage of the Maverik Center, then the E Center, in West Valley City, after a Christmas show to tell the story of his conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for a DVD recording.
After growing up Catholic, Beck had thrown himself into the world of big media money. By 24 he was making $300,000 a year “and most of it went up my nose,” Beck told the crowd. Crushed by a divorce after his first marriage and drug addiction, Beck began attending Alcoholics Anonymous. But his underlying crisis was one of meaning. Beck enrolled at Yale for an “Early Christology” class and began compiling the “library of a serial killer,” reading all he could from philosophers ranging from Nostradamus to Nietzsche.
During this time he embarked on a church tour with his fiancée with just one rule, appropriated from Thomas Jefferson and recited from memory: “Question with boldness even the very existence of God because if there is a God, he must surely rather honest questions over blindfolded fear.” If he wanted to find truth in religion, Beck believed, he must question everything, which, he begrudgingly admitted to himself, included considering the question presented by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“I didn’t want to be a Mormon, my gosh, who wants to be a Mormon?” Beck said, only half joking, in a reflection that is well-known to longtime listeners. “You’re a pariah instantly. Nobody likes you. Nobody trusts you. They all think it’s a cult. Then, you can’t do anything fun, you know, except, I guess, get fat, and even that’s not recommended.”
Beck was a tough investigator. But despite his efforts to stump the missionaries, Beck was ultimately persuaded by a simple testimony about Zion-like unity. He was baptized in 1999 by his former radio partner Pat Gray, who had nudged Beck for years to explore his faith.
The change Gray saw in Beck was enormous. When they worked together in the early ‘90s, Beck’s motto was literally “I hate people,” Gray said. “He does love people now, and that’s a huge, huge difference from 35 years ago when I first met him.” But this doesn’t mean he always comes across this way.
Gray has observed Beck wrestle with his desire to adhere to church teachings on avoiding contention amid the demands of talk radio. It’s not that Beck doesn’t have a sincere desire to heal the country, it’s just that the nature of the job is more table-flipping than balm of Gilead. “The thing about Glenn is that he really struggles with that when he does do things that may have turned out to be divisive,” Gray said. “So there’s that conflict within.”
Beck has decided that sometimes this balance is impossible; that sometimes his job isn’t to reconcile, it’s to warn. Sitting with Carlson at the Delta Center, Beck chastised residents of Utah, a state “founded on God,” for not upholding more firmly the traditional values espoused by former church President Ezra Taft Benson.
“For a people who used to really love and listen to and obey Ezra Taft Benson, what the hell is wrong with you?” Beck yelled amid cheers from the crowd.
The fact that this comment resonated with his audience speaks to church members being in “a weird split that we shouldn’t be,” Beck told me. His tendency to “overstep (his) bounds with calling out the Mormons” comes from seeing members take for granted things he treasures about the church, Beck said, like “all of the things that the church used to teach about America.”
“If that makes me a radical, oh my gosh, look out. I might put some carrot shreds in some jello a little later, too,” Beck snarked.
His frustration is precisely that those around him appear to not want to see what is coming. “I feel that way a lot of times,” Beck said. “Most people just don’t have any idea.”
Beck bought Standing Rock Ranch because he feared he was losing perspective. Fame had filled him with a worry he was “slipping” from the public eye and blurred his focus on what mattered. Having achieved his childhood dream of working radio in New York City, Beck realized he couldn’t even see the moon most nights, let alone the stars: “Everything you see is made by man.” Now, standing on his off-the-grid oasis in Idaho, Beck says he can “see the colors of the Milky Way,” and be reminded, “Gee, I’m really small.”
The ranch house is the only place Beck says he can “turn it off” after immersing himself in, and contributing to, the “constantly churning” news cycle of the day. The glowing heart of Beck’s home is a towering painting of a Shoshone man in ancient tribal clothing, arms outstretched, who is meant to represent Jesus Christ. The syncretic altarpiece rests on a wooden-beam mantle engraved with “Laus Deo,” the same call to praise God found on the east face of the Washington Monument.
The central figure of the piece, which Beck commissioned from prominent Latter-Day Saint painter Michael Malm, stands in full headdress between a young boy, representing Beck, who holds loaves and fishes, and a girl, representing Beck’s wife holding a palm frond and oil lamp. The trio are seen standing above the ranch’s crowned-skull logo and against the backdrop of the Pass of the Standing Rock.
The 100-foot-tall “Standing Rock” monolith that lies just outside of Beck’s property was a place of healing for Shoshone people after the Bear River Massacre of 1863, as it was for the Mormon pioneers who entered the valley around the same time, Beck said. He has also tried to make it a “healing place” for his family, consisting of four children and grandchildren, as well as the surrounding community. Over the last decade, Beck has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to remodel the Preston opera house and to build a new library in Dayton, where he has promised to loan his Rembrandt Peale original of George Washington for the town of 550 to enjoy.
These investments flow from the belief that Standing Rock Ranch will be Beck’s home long after he puts down the mic. A self-described catastrophist, Beck says the location was intentionally picked as a place where his family could retreat in case of a government collapse.
“I have an easier time seeing a breakdown of society globally than I do us returning to ‘Leave It to Beaver,’” Beck says. But if the union holds, then the ranch will remain a place where Beck can firmly place the spiritual above all else. “That is why I live up here,” Beck said. “It’s not about politics. It’s not about anything other than eternal principles.”
Americans at the time of Lincoln’s assassination knew something of politics bleeding into every part of daily life. Political riots over immigration had roiled the nation in the lead up to Lincoln’s election. Daily newspapers, then a relatively new invention, had pushed non-overlapping narratives into voters’ faces in an unprecedented way. By the time shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the nation’s revolutionary birth certificates — the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights — had already been trampled by the polarization of insurrectionary fury.
As I walked the gravel path away from his mountain home, Beck inserted an impromptu closing statement. If at any point during our conversation he had come across as heated, it was not his intention to divide, he said. It was his lingering anger that someone had tried to kill the former president the day before.
He wanted one more thing on the record: “We have to come together.”
An hour earlier, as we sat beneath the gaze of Lincoln’s life mask and the storm-swirling sky, Beck had told me the establishment, in Washington and the media, had it all wrong. It was censorship, not conspiracies, that was driving a wedge through the country. It was a focus on politics, instead of principles, that would cut the remaining thread of the Constitution. If the United States did split, Beck said, it would be despite his best efforts to prevent it.
“I’ll never secede,” Beck said. “I believe in those documents in the archives. Those documents belong to the United States of America. I embrace them. They don’t. They’re seceding, not me.”