One recent morning,
after the release of Donald Trump’s Tic Tac tape and his subsequent
mansplanation about locker-room talk, Glenn Beck clicked on a video of
Michelle Obama campaigning for Hillary Clinton in a New Hampshire
gymnasium. The First Lady ripped into Trump’s comments, calling them
“disgraceful” and “intolerable,” and adding, “It doesn’t matter what
party you belong to—Democrat, Republican, Independent—no woman deserves
to be treated this way.” Beck was mesmerized. On his radio program that
day, he heralded Obama’s remarks as “the most effective political speech
I have heard since Ronald Reagan.”“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.”Beck went on, “What’s
most tragic about this is us. We have, as a culture, embraced the bad
guys. I love Tony Soprano. But, when a Tony Soprano shows up in your
life, you don’t love him so much.“We’ve made everything into a game show,” he said, “and now we’re
reaping the consequences of it.” Some of this may be Beck’s own doing.
Trump’s conspiracy-peddling and doomsaying? That’s vintage Beck, who
said that the Fourth of July used to move him to tears. But now, he
said, our politicians and bankers have become crooks, our wars
meaningless, and our values lost. “I’m at a Dadaist time in my life,” he
said. “So much of what I used to believe was either always a sham or
has been made into a sham. There’s nothing deep.”Beck,
who was wearing a cardigan, a cream-colored scarf, and green pants, was
flanked by two bodyguards. The alt-right sees him as a turncoat. He
receives death threats. “These people scare the hell out of me,” he
said. Some of them are his former followers, perhaps angry at him for
disowning their beliefs while continuing to cash in on their
insecurities. (Beck’s Web site still runs ads for goods favored by
survivalists—gold ingots, concealed-gun harnesses, and food kits called
My Patriot Supply.)At Fifty-fourth
Street, he came upon the Hilton, where, in 1979, his idol, Ronald
Reagan, announced his Presidential bid. (The Gipper was unimpressed by
the “pigeon-crap-encrusted metropolis.”) “Reagan didn’t believe in the
government,” Beck said. “He didn’t believe in the party. He believed in
the people.”It was this brand of
populism that he thought Michelle Obama invoked so well. “She didn’t
say, ‘The government should do X, Y, or Z.’ She said, ‘We,’ ‘Us’—without a political party. ‘We are better.’ ‘We
need to stop this,’ ” he said. “It had to do with ‘Who are you as a
human being?’ ‘How do you view women?’ Brilliant speech,” he said. “That
was a moment that transcended all political thought.”He
didn’t know who wrote the speech. “I don’t want to know,” he said. “But
that felt real. And if it wasn’t? We’re in big trouble.”… 2016 is the year that turned Glenn Beck – Glenn, blackboards-and-chalk-covered-rants, crying-on-national-television-because-he-thought-Barack-Obama-was-going-to-kill-democracy-fucking Beck – into a Black Lives Matter supporter who apologises for his past deeds, says Obama made him a better man, and thinks Michelle Obama gave the best political speech in the past three and a half decades.
I really thought this year couldn’t get weirder. I really, really did.
What. Even.
glenn BECK??
what the FUCK
????¿¿¿¿¿¿???¿????
I know that many people who say bigoted things don’t realize how harmful it is, and when they figure it out they apologize and make changes.
But this is the last person I ever expected to change his opinion or admit to changing his opinion.
When 2016 tries to do something nice for us it looks like some weird fucking breach into an alternate dimension.
from Tumblr https://prettyarbitrary.tumblr.com/post/152921897600