Struggling radio, video and internet entrepreneur Glenn Beck, who has styled himself as a conservative firebrand and sworn enemy of the liberal media, seems to have done an about-face and is now ardently courting the journalistic outlets he previously had little use for.
“I think a lot of people are going to be turning to him after the election to ask what role he can play in the reconciliation within the Republican party and between the parties,” said one of Beck’s business associates, explaining why the right-wing radio jock and former Fox News rabble-rouser has been plying his trade in hostile territory, cooperating with profiles for Rolling Stone and Vice News.
Beck has also started showing up on MSNBC and at The New York Times, where he recently contributed an Op-Ed essay urging “empathy” for Black Lives Matter protesters, whom he described as “decent, hardworking, patriotic Americans.”
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But the role of “Great Conciliator” is surely an unlikely one for the 52-year-old Beck.
In the not-so-distant past, he has claimed that the first African American president is “a racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture”; has mused about slipping poison into Nancy Pelosi’s drink and “choking the life out” of Michael Moore; once opined, “When I see a 9/11 victim family on television, or whatever, I’m just like, ‘Oh shut up,’ I’m so sick of them because they’re always complaining”; noted that “the only [Hurricane Katrina victims] we’re seeing on television are the scumbags”; and declared, a mere three years ago, about first lady Michelle Obama, “This woman is a monster. She is Lady Macbeth. She is a frightening woman.”
Yet the Beck associate, who asked not to be further identified, continued: “A lot of people have been interested in his views. People have more stress and more emotion about this election than ever before, and the political climate has shifted among people who realize that reconciliation is critical for governing success.”
Thus the founder of the right-leaning web site TheBlaze.com—who endorsed and campaigned for incendiary Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, an also-ran for the Republican presidential nomination, and spent much of 2016 bitterly attacking the eventual standard-bearer, Donald Trump, as “a dictator in the making”—met last week for what he described as a “fascinating” session with the editorial board of the Times.
“It was what I hope for every time I meet with any press left or right but I would have never expected to find it at The New York Times,” Beck wrote on his Facebook page. “When I arrived to a full board room, they told informed [sic] me that this was an [sic] very unusual turn out.”
On the same day, Oct. 24, Beck granted a nearly 90-minute interview to staff writer Nicholas Schmidle of The New Yorker—a left-leaning magazine which in recent years has called Beck “bizarre” and “neo-Birchite”, a reference to the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-minded right-wing hate group.
“We had a real conversation about how to find our way back to principles as a people and nation after the election,” Beck wrote.
And he also taped a congenial interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose show, finally accepting an invitation from Rose, who also co-hosts CBS This Morning and contributes pieces to 60 Minutes, that he has consistently declined over the past five years.
“Is there an evolution in Glenn Beck?” the ever-sensitive Rose gently asked his guest.
“I hope so, Charlie,” Beck replied.
“I know you do,” Rose affirmed, “and you’re a growing and evolving human being.”
“He is very kind, fair and I believe perhaps the best place a man can actually have a real conversation and think deeply and thoughtfully beyond the sound byte [sic],” Beck later gushed on Facebook.
So what’s behind Beck’s sudden evolution—a laudable impulse to bring people together or something else? (Beck was not made available for an interview, and a request to The Blaze’s chief marketing officer prompted a phone call from Beck’s “business associate.”)
Former Beck associates and co-workers told The Daily Beast that this latest version of himself is consistent with a pattern in which he utters a series of hateful things and then apologizes and seeks forgiveness (or in the case of his “Obama is racist” remark, blames a mysterious brain illness that “quite honestly has made me look crazy”).
Or, as Beck suggested in an interview with this writer seven years ago, maybe he shouldn’t be taken all that seriously: “I am a guy who’s part rodeo clown.”
Beck’s current liberal media-friendly posture “is about a pattern of reinvention and cycle of apology and offense,” said a person who has known Beck well over the years.
During a January 2014 appearance on The Kelly File, for instance, he confided to his former Fox News colleague Megyn Kelly: “I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language, because I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.”
This person added: “I think he’s up to his sixth apology cycle now, where he’s onto the mainstream media when they’re supporting him, and then he realizes he’s going to get burned, and he runs away from them. He’s basically flailing.”
A second former associate said, “I think it’s his desperation for attention and relevance again. He’s not getting it from the conservative side because of the Trump stuff. So he goes to the liberal side, but it is oriented as surface agreement that will end after the election.
“The mainstream media wants conservatives to attack Trump, and Glenn wants to feel validation. It’s not about anything but ‘I don’t like Donald Trump.’ The second that election day is over, he’s going to have to start attacking Hillary Clinton, and the whole thing falls apart.”
(Beck, who told Vice News’s Michael Moynihan, a former Daily Beast editor, that he plans to vote for little-known third-party candidate Darrell Castle, regularly refers to the Democratic nominee as “evil,” although on Monday he denounced FBI director James Comey’s letter to congressional Republicans concerning a freshly discovered cache of Clinton emails as “one of the most irresponsible things to ever happen.” )
The second former associate added: “It’s kind of annoying from the media side. It just shows you how narrow the self-interests are. ‘OK, we’re going to have this guy on—who’s said all these incredibly offensive things in the past—and we’re never going to ask him about them, we’re not going to ask him about how his business is trouble… or that he’s embroiled in all these lawsuits, because we need someone from the right to attack Trump.’”
The host of MSNBC’s 10 p.m. program, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell—who has booked Beck twice for extended interviews in recent months—told The Daily Beast: “In my experience, you always welcome people to your position, whenever they come to it.”
O’Donnell, a former Democratic aide in the Senate, shares Beck’s distaste for Trump, and he doesn’t second-guess Beck’s reasons for joining him on a liberal-leaning cable outlet whose viewers don’t normally warm to Beck’s views.
“When someone is saying something that makes sense, I don’t spend a lot of time wondering why they’re saying it,” O’Donnell said. “It’s when they’re saying things that don’t make sense that I wonder why they’re saying it.”
O’Donnell was noncommittal concerning whether he’ll be having Beck on his show for a return engagement after next Tuesday.
“I cannot imagine the media landscape after November 8th,” he said. “This is a campaign right now, and we’re always interested in having voices during a campaign that are uniquely interesting because of the campaign—and they just fall out of the discussion afterwards for a variety of reasons…The discussion will change on cable news and there are going to be stories other than a presidential campaign and politics. Suddenly we’re going to be remembering that there’s a world out there.”
Meanwhile, a former colleague from the media business speculated that Beck’s virulent Never Trumpism has alienated his core audience—an observation apparently supported by comments on his Facebook page, where one reader posted: “The NY Times editorial staff might have been what you didn't expect because they are impressed with the way you hate Trump?” And another wrote: “did you take a check from clinton foundation. word on the street is you did….”
Beck’s once-thriving businesses—his privately-owned Mercury Radio Arts and its subsidiary The Blaze, which at their height generated an estimated $90 million annually—have experienced a reversal of fortune in recent years, with the loss of cable television carriage and advertising revenue, multiple layoffs of employees in the company’s suburban Dallas headquarters and a shutdown of operations in New York.
Beck has publicly complained that his support of Cruz cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the The Blaze’s website has suffered plunging traffic, prompting a re-launch and new design this week that were internally dubbed “Project Phoenix.”
But if Beck hopes his reinvention will attract a new audience to replace the fans he’s lost, his former associates are dubious. And Beck himself told Rolling Stone: "I'm a catastrophist. Though I wish I didn't, I see all the millions of ways everything is going to fall apart."
“Glenn’s a survivor, and Glenn knows he made a bet and lost on Cruz, and he knows the recrimination that’s coming,” said the former co-worker. “And there’s no more room in that world for him. He’s 100-percent alienated his audience so there’s nowhere for him to go. He’s torched the old neighborhood, so he needs to relocate.”
Said the second business associate: “His delusion is that he thinks he can go on the air and attack all those people for supporting Trump, or call Obama a racist, and doesn’t understand why can’t we all just get along. He is going to say horribly offensive things about Hillary. He just is. He’s like the guy who just punched someone in the face, and when the other guy punches back, he says, ‘What are you doing? Why can’t we all just get along?’”
