Glenn Beck: Stephen K. Bannon ‘Uses the Dark Web,’ Possibly to Hire Assassins

Glenn Beck reacted to the news of Stephen K. Bannon joining Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by suggesting the former Breitbart News executive threatens the lives of his enemies and former associates.

Beck suggested Wednesday that Bannon might use “the Dark Web” for illegal activities, up to and including hiring assassins.

This is not the first time Beck lashed out at Bannon. Last February, after Beck’s endorsed candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) lost the Nevada primary to Trump, he launched into an angry rant on his radio show calling Trump supporters “Brownshirts” and comparing Bannon, a former Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy, to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

As reported by Breitbart’s Ezra Dulis:

This is a guy who uses the Dark Web. If you don’t know what the Dark Web is, good for you. Dark Web is where you can hire assassins — oh, it’s frightening. It is frightening. It’s where you get child porn, you can buy sex slaves, it’s horrible. This guy uses the Dark Web to find people to do investigations and whatever else he would like to do. The person that we wanted to get on to talk about him, because I’ve talked to them several times in the past, and knows him inside and out, is now too afraid to come on because he’s using the Dark Web against this individual and they’re afraid. They do not want to say anything more about him.

Compare that pitch for an Oliver Stone movie to this description from Bloomberg, which for all we know could be Beck’s source for the claim:

When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through. So GAI researchers plumbed tax filings, flight logs, and foreign government documents to turn up what the foundation withheld. Their most effective method was mining the so-called Deep Web, the 97 percent or so of information on the Internet that isn’t indexed for search engines such as Google and therefore is difficult to find.

“Welcome to The Matrix,” says Tony, GAI’s data scientist, as he maps out the Deep Web for me on a whiteboard (we agreed I wouldn’t publish his last name). A presentation on the hidden recesses of the Web follows. “The Deep Web,” he explains, “consists of a lot of useless or depreciated information, stuff in foreign languages, and so on. But a whole bunch of it is very useful, if you can find it.” Tony specializes in finding the good stuff, which he does by writing software protocols that spider through the Deep Web. Since this requires heavy computing power, Tony struck a deal to use the services of a large European provider during off-peak hours. “We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity,” he says. This effort yielded a slew of unreported foundation donors who appear to have benefited financially from their relationship with the Clintons, including the uranium mining executives cited by the New York Times (who showed up on an unindexed Canadian government website). These donations illustrate a pattern of commingling private money and government policy that disturbed even many Democrats.

The South Dakota tech firm BrightPlanet shows Beck doesn’t even get the category right. “The Deep Web is anything that a search engine can’t find… The Dark Web then is classified as a small portion of the Deep Web that has been intentionally hidden and is inaccessible through standard web browsers,” their explainer page says. Not even Bloomberg reported that Bannon himself participated in Deep Web research but that he managed those who did. For Beck to take this fact and end up with murder for hire is actual lunacy.