If you think Fox News is unhinged now, well, it wouldn’t have gotten there without Glenn Beck. In the late aughts and early teens, the talk radio stooge-turned-TV commentator had the most deranged show on the network. Where Bill O’Reilly would sit at a desk and rattle off his offensive theories, Beck would stand in front of a chalkboard, patiently laying out convoluted nonsense conspiracy theories. At the peak of his powers, he got compared to Network’s Harold Beale and inspired Jon Stewart to dedicate Daily Show episodes to epic impersonations. But even Beck was too bonkers for Fox News. The two parted ways after only two years. Beck lost his grip on the culture and, eventually, he even started apologizing for the way he’d once acted.
Well, no more. It’s 2021, the most powerful figure in the Republican party is a failed blogger who lives alone in resorts, and it’s time for Beck, who after Fox News crawled back to his old home at TheBlaze, to come back, baby. And so he did, appearing Wednesday night with Tucker Carlson (obviously) to repeat one of the things that got his show thrown in the can a decade back.
That thing is this: Starting in 2009, Beck called then-president Barack Obama a racist. “This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture,” he said on a different Fox News show. “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”
But the rightwing mouthpiece who years later took that patently absurd charge back is now…putting it back in, or however one phrases it. After Carlson told Beck he thought that was a “deep insight,” Beck couldn’t help but agree that he was right about himself from ten years ago.
“I take my apology back! I was exactly right!” Beck told Tucker. “And I even stated it right. You are a racist if you believe in critical race theory, if you think that what Dr. Martin Luther King said, that envisions a country that is seeing people for the content of their character, not their color, if you think that’s wrong, then yes, you are a racist.”
It’s an exciting time for disgraced former Fox News employees, what with Bill O’Reilly joining the aforementioned Donald Trump on a nationwide (well, three-state) tour later this year to talk about the one-term presidency that ended with a failed but fatal insurrection. And if you want to see proof of how the network has fallen deeper into the ether, watch Beck return to repeat a ridiculous statement that, in a very different time, helped end his employment.
You can watch the full segment in the video above, if you’d like.
(Via Mediaite)