Glenn Beck, in Deathbed Confession Cinema

After spending the past few years being a completely unhinged asshole—riling up his angry and disgruntled conservative viewers with inflammatory lies and half-truths, demonizing liberals, feminists, LGBTQIs, people of color, immigrants, atheists with provocative warnings about ominous conspiracies and agendas, and dehumanizing them with eliminationist language—now he's backing away from what is unerringly the foreseeable result of such incendiary rhetoric and telling his viewers not to get violent.


[Full transcript below.]
You know, maybe it's just because I'm a little paranoid, what with people like Beck screaming about how people like me are traitors who are hell-bent on ruining America, but this entire thing seemed like: 1.) A perfunctory insurance policy so he can't get blamed when the inevitable happens; 2.) A winking encouragement to make it happen.

It's right here when it really happens: "Our founders sailed across the ocean—battled killer storms, smallpox, they vomited for three months on a tiny little wooden ship with a bedsheet for a sail!—just to get a grievance before the king. They did that for twenty long years. What have we done? [sniveling voice] 'Well, I sent an email, I made a phone call, they won't even listen to me anymore.' [back to regular voice] So the next logical progression is email, phone, a gun? Only for a crazy person." It's in the tone of his delivery—right up until he goes into that sniveling voice, it's an exhortation for drastic action, but then he pulls back into perfunctory insurance policy mode.

It's like he's deliberately playing to the unstable person in the audience who will touch his nose and then point at the TV: "I gotcha, Glenn. Only a 'crazy person' would use a gun. Well, I'm just the kind of crazy motherfucker you're looking for, friend."

Yeah, I'm probably just a wacky paranoiac. But I wonder: Why didn't Beck explain what he thinks is the appropriate next "forceful" step between phone and gun?

I guess that's just a blank his viewers will have to fill in for themselves.

The best thing you can do right now is to let Congress know that you are watching them like a hawk. You show up. You, you let them feel your burning gaze on them at all times. But here's the thing that I, I'm concerned about—your interaction with them needs to be respectful, polite, forceful, and peaceful.

I've been warning Congress now for a couple of years, and the time has come and passed for them to be able to learn from this. I've been telling them, "You have to listen to the people," or they'll be in real big trouble. Well, now let me give the warning to you: If anyone thinks that it would be a good idea to turn violent—think again. It would destroy the Republic. I feel it with everything in me.

There is a great reason for hope right now, because I am telling you for the first time, since I started saying this in the last couple of years, for the first time I know it, I feel it, the American people are starting to wake up. These people in Washington have no idea what they have done; they have awakened a sleeping giant!

But just one lunatic like Timothy McVeigh could ruin everything that everyone has worked so hard for, because these people in Washington won't pass up the use of an emergency. Look how the media ran with the abortion doctor killing! They tried to pin that despicable act on Fox in general and specifically Bill O'Reilly and me! The only, the only thing either of us have ever said is there's no reason for that, ever.

I don't wanna ever hear from our own Americans, anyone, voicing some sort of Muslim extremist-type justification, as we heard in the circles after 9/11, "Well, I could see how they, ya know, how they felt they had to do it—course I don't agree." Absolutely not. There is no excuse for violence.

Our founders sailed across the ocean—battled killer storms, smallpox, they vomited for three months on a tiny little wooden ship with a bedsheet for a sail!—just to get a grievance before the king. They did that for twenty long years. What have we done? [sniveling voice] "Well, I sent an email, I made a phone call, they won't even listen to me anymore." [back to regular voice] So the next logical progression is email, phone, a gun? Only for a crazy person.

If you ever hear something thinking about or talking about turning violent, it is your patriotic duty to stop them. The only way to save our Republic is to remain peaceful. Forceful, but peaceful.

From New York—good night, America.