Are we moving Beck-wards?

ORLANDO – In front of about 8,000 of his most fanatical followers, Glenn Beck - king of all right-wing media and leading designer of America's newest paranoid style - drove home his main point about the nation's political crisis by awkwardly wielding a sledgehammer across the stage.

But don't get the wrong idea or anything - especially not after a week of jangled nerves for the nation's body politic, with Democratic Congress members who voted for a massive health-care overhaul reporting death threats, bricks through office windows and other vandalism.

Actually, Beck - whose teary meltdowns, sarcastic rants and White House witch hunts have made the Fox News Channel talker an icon of the tea party movement - used the sledgehammer as part of a metaphoric plea for a Gandhi-and-Martin-Luther-King-inspired nonviolent resistance to what he claims is the government's march toward socialism.

"Get God on your side, and then pick up a hammer," Beck said Saturday at a tent-revival-meets-politics rally that nearly packed the University of Central Florida basketball arena. Quoting Gandhi, he took the hammer to an anvil onstage and said: "With nonviolence, take your hammer and pound that truth every day, and everything that doesn't fit, toss it out! We have the truth . . . With nonviolence, be the anvil of truth every single day!"

The Orlando rally was the first of at least two heavily promoted, daylong American Revival events featuring the TV-and-radio star and some of his favorite pundits, designed to answer a question that might have seemed ludicrous just a year ago but which on Saturday attracted followers from up and down the Eastern Seaboard, including the Philadelphia region:

Now that Glenn Beck has captured everyone's attention, just where exactly is he trying to take America, anyway?

Beck plans to slowly roll out the answer over the course of 2010. He'll be publishing a not-surprisingly apocalyptic political thriller this spring, hosting an audacious rally at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in late August - on the 47th anniversary of King's "I Have a Dream" speech there - and has claimed he'll release another book right before the fall elections with a 100-year plan for reviving America.