Glenn Beck On Losing Listeners Over His Anti-Trump Stance: 'I Don't Care'

Appearing as a guest on Recode Media with Peter Kafka at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Glenn Beck remained firm in his opposition to President Donald Trump.

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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.

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.”

Glenn Beck’s notoriety was at its peak in the early days of the Obama administration when the talk radio host had a daily television show on Fox News. He did in depth exposés about Obama appointees, shadowy money men and leftist conspiracies. Often his show was too full of emotion and melodrama for my tastes but he definitely influenced the news cycle and political debate.

He took a not-so-veiled shot at the media outlets who sold out their principles to ride the money Trump train.

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“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.’”

He acknowledges that his stance has cost him though.

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.”

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Some might scoff because there was definite friction between Beck and Andrew Breitbart, but Beck decried what Steve Bannon did with Breitbart News after Andrew’s untimely death.

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.”

“Right is right.”

Listen to the whole podcast episode here:

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