New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is that  Fox granted backstage access at its recent Republican debate to a New York Times reporter--as Sherman put it, "Fox's decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person." That sounds rather aggressive, and Sherman sees this as some sort of political shift:

That "sweating" session was a debate moderated by three Republican attorneys general, who are in some ways to the right of some of the candidates--particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Given that the conservative base of the Republican party seems to have questions about the ideological commitment of these two--especially Romney--the fact that Fox convened a debate where the candidates had to field questions from the right doesn't really seem like playing to the "center."

Sherman argues:

On Friday's broadcast of the O'Reilly Factor (10/14/11), Beck was there to show how wild conspiracy-mongering is done:

O'REILLY: What's the George Soros factor here?

BECK: George Soros is connected with this through the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation, his Open Society and Code Pink are involved in what is called the Wall Street Journal... Occupied Wall Street Journal. And it is a--it's a full color newspaper.

O'REILLY: Right.

BECK: You know what it costs to print a newspaper.

O'REILLY: Somebody is behind that.

BECK: Huge money. Huge money.

O'REILLY: Right, and what's the editorial bent of the newspaper?

BECK: Revolution.

O'REILLY: OK, overthrow?

BECK: Yes, I mean, you know, collapse the system.

Beck manages to names names. SEIU and the Working Families Party are involved in what is obviously a global Marxist revolution. (Some of the evidence has been erased from Craigslist, but Beck has it.)

And, Beck warns, it goes all the way to the White House. Barack Obama is a "street organizer.... He knows everything that's going on, he knows all the people that are involved." Beck went on to predict that there will be violence, and that Van Jones will emerge to reap the benefits.

To be fair, O'Reilly offered another take, one more sympathetic to the protests. That came courtesy of Geraldo Rivera.

On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure.

What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters.

In addition, we have some unions in the mix: the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and, of course, the always reliable SEIU. Of course, not all workers in those unions support bringing down capitalism. They don't. But their leadership is certainly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

But, again, what do these people want?

The common thread seems to be "income equality." Groups like the Working Families Party and the Strong Economy for All Coalition are basically socialistic outfits. They want the government to take money away from the affluent and give it to them, a nice deal if you can get it. And you can get it in places like Cuba and Zimbabwe.

The big money behind these protesters, Soros, he doesn't want socialism. Soros is the biggest capitalist on the planet. He wants power and these groups are using the far-left zealots to try to achieve that.

In case your tinfoil hat is not getting good reception, O'Reilly's point is that MoveOn endorsed Occupy Wall Street two weeks after it started, and George Soros contributed to MoveOn in 2003-04, and therefore Soros is "the big money behind these protesters."

Maybe the chalkboard would help.

This was one of the episodes where I showed the railroad tracks that were different than America. In America, the left railroad track is gigantic government--it could be Communist or Fascist, it doesn’t matter, it's giant government. The other side of the track is anarchy or very, very small government. So that's the left and right here in America. The Left and Right in Europe, because, once they got rid of the kings, they didn’t get "We the People," they had to replace it with another strong government. And that's where Fascism and Communism came from. That’s your left and right. Fascism on the right; Nazis. And Communism on the left. And there are variations on both of those theories, Fascism and Communism, left and right. This guy, the shooter, is from the right-wing, different than our right-wing. It is still big government.

Just to give an example of how Anders Behring Breivik's politics are not completely different from right-wing politics in the United States, in the same radio broadcast, Beck shared his feelings about the victims of the Norwegian shooting spree:

As the thing started to unfold and there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. Who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing.

So the kids who were massacred in Norway were kind of like Hitler Youth. Which is to say they were kind of going to grow up, take over the world, impose a totalitarian dictatorship and commit genocide. What's the rational thing to do with people like that, if no one else is going to stop them?

This is a fairly standard argument for Beck, with the steps one should take to stop the Nazi-like menace usually left unspecified. For example, he repeatedly portrayed the Tides Foundation, a fairly obscure funding group, as the secret organization "behind it all...involved in the nasty of the nastiest" (9/29/09). On his July 13, 2010 show, he presented Tides as being behind a plot to "kill white babies"--suggesting that it might soon be too late to stop it.

And  a few days later, on July 17, Glenn Beck fan Byron Williams set out with his arsenal to try to wipe out the Tides Foundation staff, much as Breivik went to exterminate the "Hitler Youth" summer campers. Unlike Breivik, Williams didn't make it to his target; he was arrested after a shoot-out with police instead.

No doubt Williams, in Beck's mind, isn't a real right-winger either.