you<u+2019>ve recently been talking a lot about wanting to warn liberals, based on your experience, now that donald trump is president-elect. i don<u+2019>t imagine that many liberals listen to your show, but here you are on the back page of the new york times magazine. here is your liberal audience. what do you want to say to them? please be better than i was. please learn from my mistakes. let<u+2019>s just take it from 2000: george w. bush was called an idiot, among other things. it got so bad that republicans and conservatives just stopped listening to the media, because we made everything about jingoism. and so what happened? the pendulum swung back so far the other way that the next guy who was elected president offered hope and change, but all a lot of people saw was that he, for a while, wasn<u+2019>t wearing a flag pin. they stopped listening to people on the left. now we<u+2019>re here in crazy town. what we need now is for reasonable people to sit down with each other and say: o.k., your guy wasn<u+2019>t the end of the world. my guy wasn<u+2019>t the end of the world. how can we talk to each other? but this guy might actually be the end of the world. it<u+2019>s why i didn<u+2019>t vote for him. because if it<u+2019>s going to get bad, he could bring out the worst in us. i think he could be one of the most dangerous presidents to ever come into the oval office. we have to watch him carefully, but also focus on each other and make this work. you<u+2019>ve admitted that you were part of the problem that paved the way to trump <u+2014> you<u+2019>ve expressed regret, for example, for calling president obama a racist <u+2014> but i see your role in all of this as a bit more than just <u+201c>a guy who insulted the president.<u+201d> i could excuse it, to some degree <u+2014> i won<u+2019>t <u+2014> but i could excuse some of it by saying that i was trying to, in some ways, accomplish what jon stewart can accomplish: draw huge crowds, make points and then encourage you to do your own homework. i know i wouldn<u+2019>t believe me if i heard myself apologizing, so i<u+2019>m telling you now: don<u+2019>t take my word for it. watch my actions. i don<u+2019>t care what you think about me. all i care about is saying, please, don<u+2019>t make the mistake i made. do you think this sentiment extends to your conservative peers? it is painful for people on the right to agree with me, because they<u+2019>ll pay a high cost. i<u+2019>m looking for people who are willing to put some skin in the game and say, look, here<u+2019>s how we went wrong. you<u+2019>ve certainly been directly complicit in the mainstreaming of a conspiratorial way of thinking about our politics. i see the conservative media sphere, in general, as having created a hothouse atmosphere, where there<u+2019>s this idea that everyone is out to get us. i don<u+2019>t think that<u+2019>s fair. the first time i ever really heard that kind of serious talk from anybody was about there being a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get us. we both play that game; we<u+2019>ve done, on the right, the same thing that we accuse the left of doing. you have to know what<u+2019>s true and what<u+2019>s not, and quite honestly that<u+2019>s where the media is supposed to come in and fill the gap. this fall, a new yorker article called you a black lives matter supporter, which you then roundly denied. could you clarify your stance? what i am a supporter of is the people i have met who say, <u+201c>there<u+2019>s a real problem in our community, and no one<u+2019>s listening to us.<u+201d> i loved your analogy to illustrate how you came to understand the movement <u+2014> that it<u+2019>s similar to going to a dinner party where everyone gets pie except you and no one recognizes the inequity, but everyone swears that you deserve the dessert. how did you come up with that? do i look like a guy who has a hard time coming up with a pie analogy? interview has been condensed and edited. sign up for our newsletter to get the best of the new york times magazine delivered to your inbox every week. a version of this article appears in print on november 27, 2016, on page mm70 of the sunday magazine with the headline: glenn beck is sorry about all that. today's paper | subscribe
glenn beck is sorry about all that
ana marie cox