Camp of the Saints links me approvingly, like a gentleman and a scholar. And then he draws an interesting parallel between Beck and Founding Father James Otis:

Otis suffered from increasingly erratic behavior as the 1760s progressed. Otis received a gash on the head by British tax collector John Robinson’s cudgel at the British Coffee House in 1769. Some mistakenly attribute Otis’s mental illness to this event, but it has been shown to be unrelated by Wroth and Zobel. John Adams has several examples in his diary of Otis’s mental illness well before 1769. By the end of the decade, Otis’s public life largely came to an end.

Notoriety is a drug. Many overdose.