Kenneth B. Kimbley Jr. of Spirit Lake, Idaho, is the latest to face prison time for interpreting Beck’s rants as a call to action.

Kimbley claims to be the leader of the Brotherhood of America Patriots, an extreme-right militia whose mission, he says, is to “resist in the event the government started rounding up the patriots” and to stand up in the face of foreign invasions or societal breakdowns. (Authorities believe Kimbley’s group was tiny.) At the time of his arrest in July, Kimbley had 20,000 rounds of ammunition, a stock of firearms, and materials he planned to use to construct grenades, according to court documents.

According to the Spokesman-Review of Spokane, Wash., Kimbley’s lawyer described her client as a man with strong political views who posed no real danger to society. “In fact, everything said by Mr. Kimbley is no different than what his idol, TV commentator Glenn Beck, typically states on the air,” public defender Kim Deater wrote in court papers.

Byron Williams and Richard Poplawski, also Beck fans, got a lot farther in their alleged antigovernment actions before being caught.

Williams, who likened Beck to a “schoolteacher,” is charged with shooting and wounding two members of the California Highway Patrol during a July confrontation that occurred on his way to San Francisco, where he allegedly planned to start a revolution by assassinating leaders at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation, both regular targets of Beck’s furious rants. (The Tides Foundation, in fact, would be barely known if not for at least 29 mentions made by Beck, including two in the week before the shootout, according to Media Matters.)

Poplawski, for his part, allegedly shot three police officers to death in April 2009 after his mother called them to the Pittsburgh home they shared.

“Rich, like myself, loved Glenn Beck,” Eddie Perkovic, Poplawski’s best friend told reporter Will Bunch of Media Matters, among others. Prior to the shooting, Poplawski reportedly was “obsessed” with two of Beck’s pet theories: that there is an imminent food crisis and that paper money will soon be worthless. Like Kimbley and Williams, Poplawski worried that the government planned to intern dissidents in concentration camps.

Although Beck in the past has denied responsibility for the extreme actions of his viewers, it isn’t surprising his inflammatory expositions about what the government and its “progressive” allies are doing could push certain people over the edge and into violence.

Dubbing himself a “progressive hunter,” Beck proclaimed in January that like the “Israeli Nazi hunters … I’m going to expose what [progressives] have done and make sure that people understand.” In June, he said “anarchists, Marxists, communists, revolutionaries, Maoists” would need to “eliminate 10% of the population” to “gain control.” In July, he said that “[t]he army… of the extreme left is gathering” and that it believes that “cops are bad, kill the cops, they’re the oppressors.” In September, he warned, “Violence will come. And violence will come from the left. Violence is part of the plan.”

The connection between Kimbley’s beliefs and Beck’s provocative on-air statements seems clear, especially his fear that the government plans to round up and intern liberty-loving Americans, a fear that was also expressed by Poplawski and Byron.

One of Beck’s earliest public flirtations with the idea that government concentration camps might be real came in March 2009, exactly a month to the day before Poplawski allegedly opened fire on officers responding to a domestic dispute at his home. (Alex Jones, a far-right antigovernment conspiracy theorist and repeat FOX guest who Williams cited as an additional influence, also had trumpeted the theory for some time.) Beck has since claimed to debunk the idea of government camps, but the rest of his rhetoric is hardly even-handed. And though he tempers his endless alarms with reminders that “it is not time to pick up guns” or “blow anything up,” his most volatile fans apparently take these admonitions with a grain of salt.

“Beck is gonna deny everything about a violent approach and deny everything about conspiracies,” Williams told John Hamilton of Media Matters. “But he’ll give you every reason to believe it.”

“[B]race yourself. We went to two or three experts yesterday,” the Fox News Channel host said in his Wednesday radio broacast. “[O]ne of them said that by next year a quarter of this nation will not be able to afford food. … [I]s it going to happen? At some point, yes. When? I don’t know. I just ask you to please prepare. … Experts are now telling me that it’s happening next year.”

Beck, who for years has counseled listeners to hoard food, has long been warning that a shortage could be right around the corner — just one of many dire predictions, typically related to government malfeasance or related end-times scenarios, that have made Beck a hero of much of the radical right. Now he’s suggesting that the scary corner could be a mere six weeks away.

This time, Beck claimed that certain experts are saying that the Fed’s latest round of “quantitative easing” — a strategy that would effectively put about $600 billion into circulation during the next 12 months — is going to cause hyperinflation, the collapse of the dollar, and ultimately lead to staggeringly high food prices. He cited predictions published Nov. 5 by a group called the National Inflation Association (NIA), one of whose stated goals is to help Americans prepare for “the upcoming hyperinflationary crisis.”

The NIA — and Beck, who recited its statistics breathlessly — predicts that two pounds of sugar will “soon” go for $62.21, while 64 ounces of orange juice will be $45.71. An 11.5-ounce can of Folgers coffee will cost $77.71; and a single 1.55-ounce Hershey bar will run you $15.50. (A check at an Alabama supermarket today turned up a two-pound container of sugar for $1.89; 64 ounces of orange juice for $2.99; Folger’s coffee for $4.09; and a Hershey’s bar for 89 cents.)

The group does not explain how it reached its estimates. “Agricultural prices have gotten so far our of control,” it says, “that if corporations do start passing them along, they will simply go out of business.”

Economists dismiss this kind of sky-is-falling alarmism. “Fears of high (not to mention hyper-) inflation are severely overblown,” Eric Michael Leeper, a professor of economics at Indiana University at Bloomington, told Hatewatch via E-mail. “There are essentially NO indicators that suggest markets are expecting substantially higher inflation in the next 5 to 10 years” — let alone in a month and a half.

As for quantitative easing, Leeper said the Fed is simply doing what it always does — tinkering with the money supply to manage economic growth. At the first sign of accelerating inflation, the Fed can quickly reverse policy and drain money from the banking system, he said. “Once the economy picks up and unemployment begins to decline, the Fed will then gradually sell those long-term Treasuries back on the open market. As it sells them, it will ‘destroy money.’ Viewed this way, the Fed’s plans are NOT to permanently increase the money supply.”

But Beck insists that this isn’t just some kooky theory he dreamed up or found on a website somewhere. “We have had our financial advisors, the guys who are stat-related guys, they are not politicians, they’re more like the David Walkers of the world,” he said on his show. [David Walker is a former U.S. comptroller general who now advises the conservative-leaning Peter G. Petersen Foundation.]

Who were these advisors ? Beck, unusually bashful, declined to say. “[I]t’s not David Walker, but it’s somebody like David Walker, who’s just a bean guy, a bean-counter. This is what they do for a living.” Beck declined to name names because, he said, “quite honestly, I think many of them don’t want to be associated with me because they don’t want all the trouble.”

In the NIA, Beck seems to have found a partner in fear-mongering. “In our opinion,” the NIA’s site states, “the wealth of most Americans could get wiped out during the next decade.” Beck said he had NIA “checked out six ways to Sunday.” He’s sure they are “credible people.”

Yet the NIA does not provide much information about itself beyond the name of its president, Gerard Adams. It doesn’t offer any economic or other credentials, or give any other hint as to the basis for its alleged expertise. According to its website, this is because it is “an unbiased organization” and “it would be a conflict of interest to promote or endorse their personal businesses.” The NIA, like Beck himself, speaks highly favorably of gold as an inflation hedge, and provides information on precious metals investing on its website. Indeed, it says that one of its “missions” is “to discover and profile companies that we believe will prosper in an inflationary environment,” mainly gold and silver firms. And it predicts that America faces “hyperinflation and a complete societal collapse.” For his part, Beck has been accused of profiting from the gold sales that his doomsday economic prognostications help promote; his television show also features regular advertising pitches from firms that sell gold.

Statistics from the Bureau of Economic analysis show that grocery prices increased by only 0.06% overall in the third quarter (July-September) of 2010. And prices for fruits and vegetables, bakery, and canned goods actually declined.  If hyperinflation is imminent, it is getting off to a colossally slow start.

So in a way, Beck got it right when, stunned by the NIA’s predictions, he paused a moment and said: “This is unbelievable!”

On his Sept. 27 show, Beck found time in between exercises in connect-the-dots conspiracizing to discuss something called the Z Backscatter Van (ZBV), a mobile X-ray scanning device produced by the Massachusetts firm American Science & Engineering. After reading about the product in Forbes, Beck was confident that the Obama Administration had ordered intelligence and law enforcement agencies to purchase this technology — which can determine from a distance the general contents of parked cars and duffle bags — with nefarious ends in mind.

“They’re using them now in your neighborhoods,” warned Beck. “And the Obama administration won’t say exactly why we’re buying their vans and driving them down our streets.”

Luckily for Beck, he has an army of constitutional watchdogs scattered throughout the country in the form hundreds of 9.12 Project chapters. The clearinghouse for its intelligence efforts is the 9.12 Project Network. It was here that 9.12’er Jared Law offered the real reason the government is interested in the ZBV: To better understand what conservative activists look like in the buff.

“Any progressive in government, whether it’s your local city mayor, all the way up to an Obama regime bureaucrat, can now see you and your family, totally nude (through your clothes),” writes Law. “They have sold enough of these now that every single 9.12′er, Tea Partier, and conservative leader in America could potentially have dozens of photos of themselves and their families in the nude on Obama Regime hard drives… Yet another reason to throw out the ‘progressives,’ and to Turn To God!!”

Because if there’s one thing God hates more than totalitarian progressive peeping Toms, surely it’s nudity.

But at least one member of that media has shown Jones nothing but love. Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst for Fox News and host of the Fox Business program “Freedom Watch,” calls Jones a “dear friend” who is “doing more than anybody I know” to “educate the public” with “courage and fearlessness.” Jones responds by calling Napolitano the “best person” on national TV. Last Friday, according to liberal watchdog Media Matters for America, Napolitano was on Jones’ show for at least the sixth time, and promised to soon bring Jones on to “Freedom Watch,” which he announced was expanding from the weekend to weekdays.

Maybe they’ll get a chance to discuss a Jones theory that’s a little more racially charged than much of his usual fare: a purported secret plan on the part of undocumented Mexican immigrants to murder all whites over 16.

Jones has been railing on about the so-called Plan de San Diego since 2005, when he began to talk about the genocidal plot by radical Mexican immigrants — a “Hispanic Klan,” in Jones’ words — to start a race war against U.S. whites. As Jones described it then in his “Nightmare Racism and Open Call for Revolution” blog post, he found out about the plot at an Austin event where a number of Latinos were wearing “Plan de San Diego” T-shirts. A group of Jones’ unnamed pals — including a “Hispanic friend,” a Spanish-speaking University of Texas professor and someone “who has taken Latin-American studies” — told him the rest: A “powerful revolutionary core” of “extremist Mexican hate groups” is currently “dedicated to overthrowing Texas and setting up a racial state.” Jones did not name the groups.

Buzz about the purported conspiracy is still making the rounds today. It’s hit the message board of Stormfront.org, the world’s premiere white supremacist website; bounced to a racist Facebook page calling for the boycott of Robert Rodriguez’s movie “Machete,” and showed up on the nativist hate site VDARE.com.

In his September 2005 blog post, Jones claimed that a third of the Latinos he spoke to at the Austin event “said that Texas was [part of] Mexico and that they were taking over.” Some, Jones claimed, even said that “all whites would be killed and that the entirety of the Americas would be only for ‘indigenous peoples.’” Jones doesn’t explain why the people he spoke to would share all of these details of the anti-white conspiracy with an obvious Anglo.

As it happens, there was a real Plan de San Diego. But it emerged from a Monterey, Mexico, jailhouse in 1915, during the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. The plan called for Mexicans to kill whites over 16 in Texas, which had been part of Mexico until 1848. Several dozen U.S. citizens were murdered, but the U.S. hit back hard. A 1919 Texas legislative inquiry found that between 300 and 5,000 Mexicans were killed by the Texas Rangers, an elite police force, in retaliation.

And that was the end of that.

What Jones later described as the “illegal alien rally” in Austin where he learned of the purported Latino conspiracy was actually a Mexican Independence Day celebration. If anyone there was wearing a Plan of San Diego shirt, it was at worst a statement of nationalistic pride in a lost cause, basically akin to a Confederate flag T-shirt. Poor taste bordering on the offensive, yes, but hardly a coded call to arms.

And the “frothing and screaming” Jones says he encountered at the hands of the Latino celebrants? Jones brought a bullhorn and a crowd of “Texans for Freedom” — an antigovernment group he heads — “to educate other well-meaning celebrants” of Mexican Independence Day about the “racist groups that were preaching their message in the Hispanic community.” The “well-meaning celebrants,” apparently, did not welcome Jones’ message.

So far, Jones’ main platform has been his radio show and two Internet websites. But now, thanks to Napolitano, that may be changing. In a March 2009 appearance on Napolitano’s “Freedom Watch,” which then was only on Foxnews.com, Jones expressed appreciation for the Fox website’s decision to have him as a guest. “Thank you, Fox,” he said, “you guys are getting radical having me on over there.”

It isn’t clear if Napolitano knows about Jones’ ideas about a murderous Mexican plot to kill whites and bring Texas back into the Mexican fold. But last Friday, on Jones’ show, he did bring up the topic of Texas secession. “Guess what?” he told Jones. “That time has come. That may actually happen.”

The interview and the accompanying article, by Pacifica Radio producer John Hamilton, illuminates the role Fox News and specifically Fox host Glenn Beck played in turning Williams’ attention toward the groups and convincing him that they were at the center of a vast plot to destroy the country.

“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there,” Williams tells Hamilton. “And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.”

Beck’s influence seems especially salient with regards to Williams’ strange obsession with the Tides Foundation, a low-profile group that dispenses grants to liberal causes. According to Hamilton, Beck had attacked Tides 29 times on his Fox News show in the year-and-a-half leading up to the shooting, often placing it at the center of fantastical diagrams depicting liberal-socialist plots to wreck America.

In the interview from prison, Williams describes Beck as being “like a schoolteacher on TV.” This contradicts statements made by Williams in another interview with the Examiner, in which he claims he already knew everything Beck discussed on his show.

In his conversation with Hamilton, Williams also mentions the influence of David Horowitz, whose Discover The Networks website is the source of much of Beck’s material, and Alex Jones, the Austin-based radio conspiracist whose friend Andrew Napolitano will soon host a daily show on Fox Business.

Beck’s breathless demonization of Tides and other liberal groups has not occurred in a vacuum. The rhetoric that helped inspire Williams to pack his car with guns and ammo and head toward San Francisco finds echo throughout the rightwing media world. Media Matters has a compiled a useful archive of this material here.