Glenn Beck may not be a card carrying member of the Klan, but he rarely hesitates to pander to the racial antipathies of his viewing public! While at Fox News, Beck's vitriol toward our nation's first African-American president was never more apparent than when he said, (speaking with utter self-assurance and completely devoid of self-awareness): "This president has exposed himself, I think, as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or white culture." Beck clearly lacked an insight into his own obvious projections.
In the very next sentence, Beck slightly backtracked: "I'm not saying that he doesn't like white people. I'm saying he has a problem. He has a, this guy is, I believe, a racist." Beck was speaking of the incident in which President Obama criticized a Cambridge police officer for arresting Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, who is African-American, for the crime of being in his own house.
Of course, only using Glenn Beck's logic can one have a "deep-seated hatred toward whites," while on the other hand, not "disliking" them. And only on Fox News can such diametrically opposed utterances made within the space of a few miliseconds go unnoticed by one's interlocutor.
Regardless, the unthinkable has happened! Glenn Beck recently implied Trump's Tea Party supporters are racists. Ironically, Beck was instrumental to fueling the growth of this movement by continually preaching the evils of Big Government wedded with wild conspiracy theories! According to Beck:
"The media's making this look like [Trump's supporters are] Tea Party people. I don't think these are Tea Party people who are following him. Some of them may be, but I think these -- I mean, you can't -- if you were a Tea Party person, then you were lying. You were lying. It was about Barack Obama being black. It was about him being a Democrat, because this guy (Trump) is offering you many of the same things, as shallow in the same way. If you said to me that it bothered you about his past, you said to me, 'Hey, what about his relationship with Jeremiah Wright? What about what he's done here, here, and here?' You're not bothered by this guy, and it's exactly the same thing."
Beck is wrong, of course! It is not Trump's shallowness, but rather his xenophobia, use of slurs, and fear-mongering that define his race baiting. But then Beck is right to wonder why Trump's liberal-leaning past statements, such as his former support of abortion, does not get the same scrutiny among Tea Party members as did the president's church attendance, his childhood in Indonesia, or even the non-stop speculation on his birthplace.
And of course, Beck is the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. After all, racism, in Beck and Trump's world, is supposedly a liberal concoction that is tossed about for the sole purpose of eliciting white guilt with the goal of getting more handouts, one supposes. Until now, the real racists in Beck and Trump's world are those who acknowledge that racism is still alive in America.
Now Beck has not completely thrown the Tea Party under the bus! The usual suspects in Beck's world, like Big Government and the establishment, are to blame for the popularity of a Donald Trump among Tea Party members. Beck, the messiah, is trying to save the Tea Party from itself with the invention of a wild, new conspiracy theory:
"The Tea Party is eating its own," Beck said. "If I'm a guy who is a Republican establishment guy or I'm a liberal, I want to destroy the Tea Party. But if I'm a businessman, I want to destroy it as well. The reason why the GOP isn't suffering with their goals on campaign funds is because big business just wants business to go on. They know how to play the game. Look, Donald Trump has said, 'I give to everybody." He knows how to play the game. He doesn't know how to play the game with a libertarian, small government guy who says, 'There's no game for you to play here, Donald, and we stand by the Constitution.' So you can't buy that person or bully that person out of their house any more."
"It makes sense that he doesn't want the Tea Party," Beck continued. "So what's as good as getting the presidency of the United States? Discrediting and destroying a movement that stands for true principles. Small government and maximum freedom, stand for those who want to disrupt the system that makes everybody rich."
"I think it is really important that you stand up," he warned, "and you separate yourself as a tea partier and say, 'That is not us, that is not us.'"
Beck is making a circuitous argument that it is not Tea Party members who are attracted to Trump for his xenophobia and racist statements, but rather they are being duped into supporting Trump for these same reasons by the bogeymen of Big Government out to destroy the very foundations of the Tea Party movement by showing it is composed of racists. Strange indeed! But then Beck inhabits a very paranoid universe where the more grandiose and contrived the explanation the more obvious it is to he and his audience!
The trouble with carnival barkers like Beck and Trump is that they must always "ratchet up the rhetoric or else risk losing their audience to the next political celebrity willing to pander to what the far right wants to hear." Both Beck and Trump are "pushing the Republican Party ever further to the fringe, and hastening its demise." It is now more of a radical insurgency than a political party!
When Glenn Beck calls someone a racist it is like Jerry Springer castigating someone else for exploiting human frailties. Beck and Trump are really joined-at-the-hip conspiratorial doppelgangers and may not even realize it! After all, self-awareness often has a liberal bias!