Many say a leopard can’t change his spots. Hell, I’ve even said the narcissistic Liar In Chief President Donald J. Trump, a leopard of sorts himself, cannot change his spots after 70 years of being him. Then along comes this. Glenn Beck taking responsibility. Cleansing his soul and repenting of his divisive rhetoric. Perhaps he had an epiphany that changed him, who knows. But if sincere it is indeed a good thing.
The Washington Post – The so-called liberal media are preaching the good news about Glenn Beck in unison: He is redeemed! “Glenn Beck Is Sorry About All That,” the New York Times says. The New Yorker announces that “Glenn Beck Tries Out Decency.” The Atlantic catalogues “Glenn Beck’s Regrets.”
In the publications that Beck for years dismissed as an effete elite that had led the nation astray, the notion that Beck has now apologized for everything he did to make America an uglier, louder, more fractious place is just too delicious to resist. Now, in a moment of deep gloom for the nation’s intellectuals, life delivers a gleaming gift: Glenn Beck, godfather to the tea party, cable news rabble-rouser of the first order, a hawker of ornate and dire conspiracy theories, not only has spent the past year as a Never Trumper but also has spurned his past and is testifying to the power of love, understanding and empathy — for liberals!
For those who yearn to believe the movement that made President Trump possible is having serious second thoughts, the new Glenn Beck seems heaven sent.
Seven years ago, Beck was the fourth most admired man in the country (just ahead of the pope). He shouted, he explained, he wept, he drew intricate charts on his chalkboard to show how evil forces were conspiring against good Americans. He sowed fear and gathered up his minions to form an army of righteous anger, who stormed the nation’s capital a hundred-thousand strong to stand tall for the Constitution, determined to fulfill the prophecy that Beck, a Mormon, had described to them: a stirring tale of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith’s followers parading through the streets of Utah, with only the Constitution to protect them.
Back then, Beck was the bad boy of cable, on CNN’s HLN channel and then on Fox News — one more former Top 40 radio disc jockey who, like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern and many other influential stars of talk radio, had switched from spinning the hits to spinning the news, always remembering the laws of Top 40: Keep it simple, keep it moving, never stop selling.
Beck has stopped the music.
“I’m not willing to do this anymore,” he says. He leans over, drops his head as if in penitence and pronounces himself riven with regrets.
Now, at 53, Beck sees a nation of people who are at one another’s throats, and he blames his language, his meanness and his assaults, his constant selling of the idea that the other side was evil and that his side had the one true answer. He believes that his radio show and his TV shows and his rallies on the Mall paved the way for the incivility, intolerance and general indigestion that now plagues the body politic.
“I did and said terrible things,” Beck says. “I did my thinking out loud and it’s one of my worst aspects. But I haven’t changed my principles. I’ve changed the way I phrase things — for example, I’m trying to ban the word ‘evil’ from my lexicon. I didn’t notice how my language could be interpreted by half the country as racist. I lacked humility. I was the height of arrogance.”
