We’ve expended more than a few words around here trying to fit Glenn Beck into history—as an heir to Father Coughlin, for example, or more broadly as a populist in the mold of that Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan. We’ve also tried to fit Beck into history the way you fit the cat into a carrier before taking him to the vet, trying to map his peculiar understanding of the American narrative or at least figure out where it come from. Those two lines of inquiry may just converge on the John Birch Society, as this interesting overview in the New Yorker suggests. Props to Mose for the link. In June, after Beck made a presentation on Communism in America, an essay on the John Birch Society website praised it as “the ultimate in complete agreement between the Beck and JBS presentations of American history.”