If you think Fox News is crazy now, you should know that it wouldn’t have gotten this far without Glenn Beck. The talk radio stooge-turned-TV analyst had the network’s most insane show in the late aughts and early teens. Beck would stand in front of a chalkboard, carefully writing out intricate bullshit conspiracy theories, and Bill O’Reilly would sit at a desk and spout off his insulting views. He was compared to Network’s Harold Beale at the height of his powers, inspiring Jon Stewart to devote entire Daily Show episodes to grandiose impersonations. Even Beck, though, was too insane for Fox News. After only two years together, they split ways. Beck lost his grip on the culture and, eventually, he even started apologizing for the way he’d once acted.
That is no longer the case. It’s 2021, the Republican Party’s most prominent person is a failing blogger who lives alone in resorts, and it’s time for Beck, who crawled back to his old home at TheBlaze after Fox News, to come back, baby. And so he did, going on Tucker Carlson’s show Wednesday night (obviously) to repeat one of the things that got his show canned a decade ago.
This is what it is: Beck began calling then-President Barack Obama a racist in 2009. “I think this president has exposed himself as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture, over and over again,” he stated on a different Fox News show. “I feel this man is a racist.”
But the rightwing megaphone that resurrected that clearly ludicrous claim years later is now…resurrecting it, or whatever one wants to call it. Carlson said that was a “deep insight,” and Beck couldn’t help but admit that he was correct about himself 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.”
Bill O’Reilly will join the aforementioned Donald Trump on a nationwide (well, three-state) tour later this year to discuss the one-term administration that ended with a failed but fatal insurgency, making it an exciting moment for disgraced former Fox News staffers. Watch Beck return to repeat a foolish comment that helped him lose his job in a previous era if you want proof of how the network has sunk farther into the ether.
