Glenn Beck, the former Fox News pundit who once claimed that President Barack Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people,” now empathizes with Black Lives Matter and thinks that Donald Trump is “unhinged.”
Beck, who says he met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the Republican nominee’s resort in Palm Beach, Florida, tells The New Yorker’s Nicholas Schmidle that Trump directed Beck to one room of the resort and then phoned him from the next room:
“We had this weird, almost Howard Hughes-like conversation,” Beck said. He left convinced that Trump was nuts. “This guy is dangerously unhinged,” he said. “And, for all the things people have said about me over the years, I should be able to spot Dangerously Unhinged.”
Beck, who once compared the 2010 stimulus bill to slavery, now asks conservatives to try to empathize with Black Lives Matter, as The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reported in August. Beck once held a rally with Sarah Palin at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech. But he told Schmidle that “there are things unique to the African-American experience that [he] cannot relate to” and that he “had to listen to them.”
Beck once called Hillary Clinton a “stereotypical bitch.” But he praised Michelle Obama’s speech attacking Trump’s treatment of women as “the most effective political speech I have heard since Ronald Reagan.”
The pundit — who during Obama’s first term in office compared a number of contemporary issues to slavery, including illegal immigration, “progressive policies,” government spending, government debt, “government giveaways” and changes to tax reduction rules, and who warned that Marxists and Communists were planning to take over the country — now believes he was too hard on the president whom he once compared to a “slavemaster.”
“I did a lot of freaking out about Barack Obama,” Beck told Schmidle. But, he added, “Obama made me a better man.”
After this story published, a member of Beck’s PR team reached out to The Huffington Post to say that while Beck empathizes with Black Lives Matter, he doesn’t “support the organization,” and they’ve asked The New Yorker for a correction. An editor at The New Yorker told HuffPost that the magazine stands by Schmidle’s story and will not be adding a correction to it. HuffPost’s article has been updated accordingly.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a