Glenn Beck views all of human history as little more than a series of cycles that continuously repeat, seeing it as his responsibility to understand those cycles and uncover the modern-day recurrences in order to warn all of humanity what is coming down the road.

So when something happens today, it is just like what happened in the past, which means that what happens next will be just like what followed when it happened the last time in exactly the same fashion and on the same timeline.

All of which is a convoluted way of explaining that, according to Beck, we are now on the verge of World War III.

“It’s the United States versus Russia,” Beck declared on his radio broadcast today. “This is what all of us who are my age grew up worried about. This is it. It’s been a cold war. It’s been a proxy war. It’s been one where nobody really understands it yet. But I think you’re about to. I think this whole thing in the Middle East is the beginning of the end of the proxy war and the covert war. You’re now going to see an openly hot war, I fear, and the beginning of World War III”: