Spirits were not high at Fox News Thursday night. Why would they be? Donald Trump, the guy whose antics led to a potentially apocalyptic lawsuit against them, was finally indicted by the Manhattan district attorney. While the non-MAGA wing of social media exploded in delight, that evening’s stars were beside themselves. But for arguably the nuttiest reaction, they had to bring back one of their old school kooks, whose bloviations during the Obama era sometimes make Tucker Carlson look like, uh, I dunno, Neil Cavuto maybe? And whose current theories once got brutally fact-checked by Tucker himself?
Glenn Beck just went on a DERANGED rant about the future of America:
“The fundamental transformation that started in 2008 is finished. … By 2025, we are going to be at war. We are going to have a new dollar, [and] we will live in a virtual police state.” pic.twitter.com/nqE87l9xl1
— Kat Abu (@abughazalehkat) March 31, 2023
That person is, of course, Glenn Beck, who went from an ‘80s “morning zoo” radio DJ to an aughts Howard Beale for the far right. Throughout the Obama years, he brought impenetrable conspiracy theories, told with the aid of blackboards and lots of arrows, into Boomers’ living rooms every weeknight until even Roger Ailes got sick of him.
But back he came to unleash some 15-year-old-style nonsense, and on Tucker’s show no less. “The fundamental transformation that started in 2008 is finished,” Beck ominously averred while Carlson made one of his confused faces. “We are no longer viewed as a superpower. We are now an elderly…we are Joe Biden, just walking into the twilight.”
Beck’s appearance was filled with paranoia and projection, with him claiming Democrats want rightwing violence, “so then they can close the cage.”
Beck then dropped some predictions even Trump himself would find gloomy: “By 2025, we are going to be at war. We are going to have a new dollar, a currency that probably is coming from the Central Bank, have a currency collapse. And we will live in a virtual police state.
“I know that might sound crazy to a lot of people,” he added.
Beck then weighed in on the big guy himself, who, just a reminder, professes to be unimaginably wealthy and is also a former U.S. president.
“Donald Trump is not even a person anymore,” Beck thundered. “He is a symbol. He is a symbol of the average, everyday guy that keeps getting screwed every single time. Watch as other people screw up big banks, screw up their companies, and get away with it. They see people all the time doing stuff they know if they did, they’d be in prison for 20 years.
“Donald Trump has taken arrow after arrow,” he went on. “And that’s why this is the way the average American feels tonight. I hope that there’s a few Democrats out there. But this guy has been taking the bullets for the average person now for years, and people on the right feel like he’s the only guy that really gets what the people are feeling.”
It was classic Glenn Beck, in that it was paranoid and conspiratorial and vague all at the same time. It was also a very different version of him than the one that emerged in 2016, when Trump was on the verge of improbably clinching the presidency. That’s when a new, weirdly apologetic Beck emerged, putting away the tinfoil hat splutterings and trying to be a voice of reason.
“It is not acceptable to ask a moral, dignified man to cast his vote to help elect an immoral man who is absent decency or dignity,” Beck wrote in a Facebook post in October, mere weeks before election day. “If the consequence of standing against Trump and for principles is indeed the election of Hillary Clinton, so be it. At least it is a moral, ethical choice.”
Anyway, wonder what caused him to flip-flop away from being rational.
(Via Mediaite)