In The Naked Communist, a lengthy primer published in 1958, he [Skousen] enlivened a survey of the worldwide leftist threat with outlandish claims, writing that F.D.R.s adviser Harry Hopkins had treasonously delivered to the Soviets a large supply of uranium, and that the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. A year before Richard Condons novel The Manchurian Candidate appeared, Skousen announced that the Communists were creating a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters. A later book, The Naked Capitalist, decried the Ivy League Establishment, who, through the Federal Reserve, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Rockefeller Foundation, formed the worlds secret power structure. The conspiracy had begun, Skousen wrote, when reformers like the wealthy banker Edward M. (Colonel) House, a close adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, helped put into place the Federal Reserve and the graduated income tax.
Skousens pronouncements made him a pariah among most conservative activists, including some on the right-wing fringe. In 1962, the ultraconservative American Security Council threw him out, because members felt that he had gone off the deep end. In 1971, a review in the Mormon journal Dialogue accused Skousen of inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary, and advancing doctrines that came perilously close to Nazism. And in 1979, after Skousen called President Jimmy Carter a puppet of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family, the president of the Mormon church issued a national order banning announcements about his organizations.
By the time Skousen died, in 2006, he was little remembered outside the ranks of the furthest-right Mormons. Then, in 2009, Glenn Beck began touting his work: The Naked Communist, The Naked Capitalist, and, especially, The 5,000 Year Leap, which he called essential to understanding why our Founders built this Republic the way they did. After Beck put the book in the first spot on his required-reading listand wrote an enthusiastic new introduction for its reissueit shot to the top of the Amazon best-seller list. In the first half of 2009, it sold more than two hundred and fifty thousand copies. Local branches of the Tea Party Patriots, the United American Tea Party, and other groups across the country have since organized study groups around it. It is time we learn and follow the FREEDOM principles of our Founding Fathers, a United American Tea Party video declares, referring to the principles expounded by Skousens book. If Beck is the movements teacher, The 5,000 Year Leap has become its primer, with The Making of America as a kind of 102-level text.
