Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:43 pm
You might think Full Frontal‘s Christmas Sweater Summit was the weirdest thing you had ever seen if you had not already witnessed a foreign country elect our president, a guy so crooked he can bend light, but even so, you have to admit a conciliatory Glenn Beck sitting down with Samantha Bee and having a semi-serious conversation is pretty trippy.
Appearing on Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, “a really weird” Glenn Beck continued his “apology tour” by sitting down with Bee and agreeing with her that “Trumpism” must be fought. Bee said she invited Beck to appear on her show because,
“I think that our future is going to require a broad coalition of nonpartisan decency. It’s not just individual people against Donald Trump; it’s all of us against Trumpism.
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Beck was down with this:
“I agree. As a guy who has done damage, I don’t want to do any more damage. I know what I did. I helped divide. I’m willing to take that. My message to you is: Please don’t make the mistakes I made. And I think all of us are doing it. We’re doing it on Facebook, we’re doing it on Twitter. We tear each other apart and we don’t see the human on the other side.â€
Watch courtesy of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee:
In many ways, even without its artful flourishes, it was a strange, surreal meeting. We have all seen how Beck changed during the campaign, seeming to find a new reason to cling, however tenuously, to a reality he suddenly saw value in. Bee is as in-your-face as Beck was at the height of his popularity but driven by facts rather than voices in her head.
Beck had previously penned an op-ed in The New York Times as a show of support for Black Lives Matter, and we all remember how he was transformed by Michelle Obama’s New Hampshire speech, calling it “the most effective political speech I have heard since Ronald Reagan.â€
Beck said of her words, “If you’re a decent human being, those words were dead on.â€
If, as Beck says, the First Lady’s words are the litmus test for decency, it is easy to see who fails and who passes. Of course, it isn’t just that. Beck once called Obama a “racist” but now says, “Obama made me a better man.â€
You can believe Beck or not. Certainly, he has cried “Wolf!” often enough to be distrusted now and forevermore. As Bee told him,
“You’ve said a lot of crazy bullsh*t, OK? For people in my world, even if all you said for the rest of your life were reasonable things, I feel like you’ve still earned a permanent side eye from them. Is that OK with you?â€
“Not okay, but I think it’s rational.” Beck allowed with a faint smile. An interesting take from Beck, who calls Trump “dangerously unhinged,” defending his judgment to The New Yorker with this quip:
“And, for all the things people have said about me over the years, I should be able to spot Dangerously Unhinged.â€
Bee confessed to her confused feelings:
“What I was thinking about is that this had honestly been one of the strangest days I’ve ever had. Maybe we’re both suckers but very cautiously by fits and starts, Glenn Beck and were becoming allies?â€
That would be a strange development indeed and they shared a “strange bedfellows” cake to cement the union. As an aside, 64% of respondents on The Blaze said the article made them happy and only 13% were thinking, “WTH?”
Take from that what you will.
With Republican control of the executive, legislative, and soon, the judicial branches of government, those who oppose Trumpism must find allies wherever they can. As the old adage says, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
Even Glenn Beck.
Don’t get too excited, though: there is always The Blaze commentator Tomi Lahren to dash ice water on sanity with true Beckian hysteria by claiming “intolerant” liberals won’t let celebrities mix with Trump.
As if they’d want to.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
