The rightwing broadcaster Glenn Beck has attacked Charles Haywood, a shampoo magnate and would-be “warlord”, as a “false prophet” on his radio broadcast after the Guardian exposed Haywood’s sponsorship of a secretive, far-right men-only fraternal society.
Last week Beck devoted five minutes of airtime on the Blaze – in which he read the Guardian’s article aloud and interspersed his own commentary – to criticising Haywood and Haywood’s Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).
Beck told his listeners that the Guardian’s revelations about the shadowy group were “extraordinarily disturbing”, adding: “All of the people that are involved in this, I will make it a personal mission to expose them and what they are doing to this country.”
Beck went on to compare Haywood to the far-right Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin and the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt before saying Haywood’s ideology was “infiltrating everything. And I am aware of many of the places that it has infiltrated.”
He then warned: “There will be no hiding, but it is in our churches. It is in our media. It is everywhere.”
Later in the broadcast, Beck implored listeners: “Do not take this lightly, please.”
But Haywood’s ally Matthew Peterson – who last year recorded a podcast featuring Haywood promoting authoritarian government in the US – remains in place in as editor-in-chief of the Beck-founded Blaze Media operation, a role he assumed after Blaze acquired two media properties this month from the rightwing venture firm New Founding, which Peterson co-founded.
Peterson’s former partner at New Founding, Nathaniel Fischer, meanwhile, also serves as president of the Dallas lodge of SACR.
Blaze Media announced on 1 August that it had acquired two properties from New Founding: Align, a rightwing consumer guide website presented as “a response to the overwhelming politicization of the most popular brands in America”, and Return, a newsletter publishing often meandering thinkpieces on technology and spiritual crisis.
As part of the deal, Peterson left New Founding for the Blaze.
But Beck’s remarks on Haywood are striking in light of the New Founding deal, and Peterson and Fischer’s relationships with Haywood, who has speculated on his Worthy House website that he may one day serve as a “warlord” in “more-or-less open warfare with the federal government, or some subset or remnant of it”.
Last 22 October, Peterson hosted Haywood on the New Founding podcast The Matthew Peterson show in a panel discussion entitled “Discussing Caesarism”, which canvassed authoritarian rule as a way to “arrest the decline of our declining republic”, as Peterson put it in his introduction.
IRS filings and Texas company records show that Fischer, 38, Peterson’s former partner at New Founding and its current CEO, and a former Claremont Institute Lincoln fellow, has been president of SACR’s Dallas lodge since its founding in 2021.
The Guardian previously reported that the Dallas lodge was one of four recorded in state and federal tax filings for SACR, an invitation-only fraternal organization founded by Haywood in 2020 and financed by donations from his foundation and the Claremont Institute.
The Guardian contacted Fischer about his role in SACR and Beck’s comments on the organization.
Talking about SACR on Wednesday, Beck sardonically asked: “Is this the one where they wear the horns at night and howl at the moon in their lodge?
“Do they think that’s not creepy?”
