Then there’s the reality TV, a show titled Independence USA, in which we follow Pennsylvania’s Belcastro family as it digs in for societal breakdown. The vibe is bucolic and mild: Nick the horse treads glumly across his paddock while Frank Belcastro, paterfamilias, chivvies his long-suffering brood through apprenticeships in blacksmithery and gunpowder manufacture. Frank is like any tinkering, pottering dad figure, except that his handyman reveries open onto a landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. “The filter is outside,” he declares through his enormous mustache while working on ventilation holes in the roof of the Belcastro bunker (a partially buried shipping container), the better to preserve the clan in the event of atmospheric contamination. GBTV is right on the curve here, deep in the meme. From the frowning woodsmen of the National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Preppers to the zombie-infested pastures of Hershel’s farm in AMC’s The Walking Dead, television is having a little end-times-in-the-heartland moment. That Independence USA happens to be a hasty warming-over of Apocalypse, PA—the Belcastros’ previous attempt at a reality show, dumped by the History Channel after just three episodes—merely evidences the spirit of off-the-grid thrift that prevails at GBTV.

Liberty Treehouse is GBTV’s show “for the younger set.” Here you can step aboard the BioBus (it runs on vegetable oil), explore the history of the jelly bean, and learn what happens when you put dry ice inside a latex glove. It’s a pretty good show. You can also listen to the host, Raj Nair, gush about the Big Cheese, his visionary CEO. “Glenn is my boss,” he told viewers on March 6, “so I see him a lot, and if there’s one person he really reminds me of, it’s that of Walt Disney. This guy who has dreams … People are like, ‘Ah! Ain’t gonna happen! No way! Too crazy, too big!’ But just like Walt Disney, Glenn’s like, ‘All right!’ and that just fuels him even more.”

This is really the key to GBTV. Walt Disney, the ancient god Baal, whoever: Glenn Beck’s dream is bigger than all of us. If you think he’s going to settle for this, for exile, for blustering and bunkum-izing in an Internet backwater to a few hundred thousand true believers, then you don’t know Glenn Beck. In December, a GBTV press release announced the construction of a new HQ in Dallas, ominously promising that GBTV Studios would become “a multi-platform destination for the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.” Has he seen around the corner, to the moment when TV and the Internet converge at last? It’s coming, we all know it’s coming. And Beck is a man of the future. He’s off your screen, for now. His frog-boilings and waterworks do not currently impinge upon your mind. But as Arnold warned us, in his beautiful Terminator accent—and here the Beck-ness of it all invites an atrocious joke—he’ll be Beck.