Meet the 'End Times' Novelist Adored By Glenn Beck Who Is on His Way to Congress

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/meet-end-times-novelist-adored-glenn-beck-who-his-way-congress




Glenn Beck likes to say that he never endorses candidates—he just tells his followers how he feels about them. In Chris Stewart, the Republican nominee in Utah's 2nd Congressional District, Beck has found someone he feels pretty damn good about. "If he wasn't running, I'd be trying to convince him to work for me, to help me stay the course, strategize, and save the country," he said last winter , as Stewart's campaign was just getting off the ground. "I've actually tried to talk him out of running, because it's a lion's den in Washington."

But, Beck added, "I believe he's a Daniel."

Like the Old Testament figure who emerged unscathed from a pit of lions, Stewart—an Air Force pilot turned consultant turned end times novelist—is also a prophet of sorts, and his message is grim: "If we don't make some difficult decisions now, if we don't show the courage to do what we have to do to save our country, we won't make it for another 10 years," he said in February , in a campaign video that also served to promote a book he'd just published under Beck's imprint. But there was hope. "At critical times in our history…we literally had miracles where God intervened to save us," he said. Send me to Congress, Stewart seemed to imply, and it could happen again.

It's near certain that Stewart, running in a deep-red district in a deep-red state, will get his chance at fixing Washington next January. But his campaign has raised eyebrows in Utah, where Stewart has left a trail of furious Republicans calling for an investigation into electoral dirty tricks and old hands in both parties predicting the second coming of Michele Bachmann. "From time to time, we get a certified nutcase," one former Utah Republican politician told me. "And Chris Stewart truly is a certified nutcase."

A former Air Force pilot who holds the world record for fastest uninterrupted flight around the globe (36 hours, 13 minutes), Stewart first caught Beck's eye as an author. Stewart has published 15 books, but the 6 that put him on the map were the volumes of the Great and Terrible series, the last installment of which was published in 2008.