Glenn Beck Sponsored By Gold Merchant Promoting 9-11 Truther's Anti-Fed Book

During the January 25 and January 19 editions of Fox News' Glenn Beck, the following ad was aired:

Midas Resources, as the name implies and the ad makes clear, is a dealer of gold and other precious metals. And while it's not unusual these days for Beck's program to be sponsored (almost exclusively) by gold sellers, this ad stands apart. The book Midas Resources president Ted Anderson encourages you to buy with offers of free silver dollars is a wildly conspiratorial tome written by a New World Order conspiracy theorist and 9-11 truther.

The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve is an obscure book authored by G. Edward Griffin, and forms the basis of much of the conspiratorial fearmongering about the Federal Reserve. According to and April 5, 2006, East Bay Express (Oakland, CA) article [accessed via Nexis]:

Sometime in the last few years Johnson and Heineman began reading about mortgage elimination programs on the Internet. Such schemes aren't just a way to make money; they're a longtime staple for conspiracy theorists who claim the American monetary system is based on a massive fraud perpetrated by a cabal of bankers. The godfather of this movement is G. Edward Griffin, the founder of American Media, a Southern California company that distributes books and videos about conspiracies ranging from the banking system, to the September 11 attacks to the secret society Skull & Bones. In the early 1990s Griffin published The Creature from Jekyll Island, the movement's bible, in which he claimed that ever since the United States replaced the gold standard with paper money, the country has been plagued by inflation, while banking elites print money out of thin air to secretly enrich themselves.

Griffin, in addition to spinning conspiracy theories about the Fed, is also a 9-11 truther and has written extensively about the U.S. government's “facilitation” of the attacks. In April 2008, Griffin appeared on the radio program of conspiracist Alex Jones and claimed that he predicted just days after 9-11 that “the FBI and the intelligence agencies of the federal government had advance knowledge of this attack but did nothing to stop it,” and that he was proven right. He also is -- or, at least, was -- a member of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society. He wrote a 1970 pamphlet entitled “This is the John Birch Society: An Invitation to Join,” and a 1975 book entitled The Life and Words of Robert Welch: Founder of the John Birch Society.

Speaking of Alex Jones, who also subscribes to 9-11 trutherism, as well as New World Order paranoia and countless other conspiracies, his radio program is syndicated by The Genesis Communications Network, of which Midas Resources' Ted Anderson is the president and CEO. Anderson has appeared on Jones' show several times to hawk gold.