Since he left Fox News in 2011, Glenn Beck has been mending old wounds, apologizing for some of the things he said on Fox and trying to find common ground with liberal media personalities like Samantha Bee.
Glenn Beck says he doesn’t care if he alienates Trump voters
“Right is right and wrong is wrong,” and Beck says he won’t back down.
Photo by J Pat Carter/Getty Images
But after repeatedly condemning candidate-and-then-President Donald Trump, Beck isn’t extending any olive branches. He has a simple answer for Trump supporters who have stopped watching his videos or listening to him on the radio.
“I say this with all humility: I don’t care,” Beck said on the latest Recode Media with Peter Kafka, recorded live at South by Southwest. “Right is right, wrong is wrong. People don’t listen to me for the direction that everybody else is going in.”
“I’m a constitutional conservative,” he added. “I will take responsibility for the things that I did. I take responsibility for me. You take responsibility for you. I’m looking for people in media, on the right and the left, who have the balls to stand up to their own audience [and] say, ‘This is what we did wrong,’ ‘This is what I did wrong,’ ‘This is what I didn’t get.’”
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After leaving Fox, Beck surprised the media establishment by building a successful online video business at TheBlaze, getting $10 per month out of more than 300,000 subscribers.
He said after he became an anti-Trump conservative, “we lost a little of everything,” but it’s possible that some subscribers who left have since come back.
“We’re not where we want to be on any of our numbers,” he said. “But I think it’s reflective of what all of the media’s going through right now. We’re in this weird place that, I don’t know how it ends, I don’t know how it shakes out.”
He added: “I’ve had several conversations with my family, especially when it got really serious about Donald Trump. Loyalty is very important to the conservative mindset. To buck that — especially with Hillary Clinton, who I thought was awful — I knew we were going to get kickback.”
On the new podcast, Beck sharply criticized White House chief strategist and former Breitbart chair Steve Bannon, differentiating between the alt-right figurehead and the late founder of Breitbart News, Andrew Breitbart.
“I don’t think Andrew would be following Bannon and Breitbart [News],” Beck said. “Steve Bannon created, in his own words, a platform for the alt-right. Whether he believes in that alt-right or he’s just using that, it doesn’t matter. It’s extraordinarily dangerous. And I think Andrew believed in what he believed. I don’t think he was a game-player like that.”
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
