The untold story of this election has been the complete and total unraveling of Glenn Beck. Once the kinder, gentler version of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Beck left Fox to build a media empire at the Blaze. It was a rousing success, until it wasn’t, and its stability took a real blow when Beck put the full force of his personality behind the Cruz campaign.
That’s when things got really weird. As Mediaite’s Lindsey Ellefson chronicled:
Beck’s devotion to Cruz certainly is religious. He has fasted for the man. He has foretold violence if Cruz is not elected. He even theorizedthat God killed Justice Antonin Scalia in an effort to guide Cruz to the presidency. All of this was done while using the thinly-veiled rhetoric of “end times” prophecies.
It got worse and worse. But now, it appears Beck has totally jumped the shark:
“Those words hit me where I live,” Beck said the other day. He was speedwalking up Eighth Avenue with his wife, son, and daughter, all in from Toronto. “If you’re a decent human being, those words were dead on.”
Decency is a fresh palette for Beck, who, at Fox, used to scribble on a chalkboard while launching into conspiratorial rants about looming Weimar-esque hyperinflation, Barack Obama’s ties to radicals with population-cleansing schemes, and a Marxist-Islamist cabal itching to take over America. He once described Clinton as “a stereotypical bitch” and accused Obama of being a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.”
That was the old Beck, he insists: “I did a lot of freaking out about Barack Obama.” But, he said, “Obama made me a better man.” He regrets calling the President a racist and counts himself a Black Lives Matter supporter. “There are things unique to the African-American experience that I cannot relate to,” he said. “I had to listen to them.”
Beck’s interactions with Donald Trump helped, too. He told a story of Trump summoning him to a guest room at Mar-a-Lago; Trump then telephoned him from an adjacent room. “We had this weird, almost Howard Hughes-like conversation,” Beck said. He left convinced that Trump was nuts. “This guy is dangerously unhinged,” he said. “And, for all the things people have said about me over the years, I should be able to spot Dangerously Unhinged.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, we agree that he should be able to spot “dangerously unhinged.” A grown man who scribbles about deep seated Marxist conspiracies on a white board in a manner that is too hysterical for Fox News understands mania; a man who regularly bursts into tears while discussing the slippery slope outcome of a government policy certainly understands emotional instability; and finally, a guy who will do this, well, is just totally off his freaking rocker:
The point of all of this? Well first, a grown man who pops on a pair of swim goggles and dips his face in Cheetos shouldn’t be trusted with microwaving a burrito, let alone dispensing election advice, or pass judgment on who’s sane and who isn’t. But besides that: If Beck thinks Trump’s “dangerously unhinged,” maybe it’s because he sees a lot of himself in Trump, and because he’s jealous that someone else is riding the same apocalyptic wave that made him so much money over the years. What if, in Beck’s mind, Trump has always been teh competition?
Maybe that’s the problem, but maybe it’s something far more sinister. Maybe Beck’s conservatism was never anything more than skin deep. Maybe it was just a profitable means of making a name for himself. Maybe now that his media empire is crashing and burning around him, he’s decided to rebrand himself as an apologist for the worst liberal demagogues, as someone doing penance for a past as a conservative.
What do you think? Was Beck ever really conservative, or was it always about the money?
AAN Staff
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