When reports broke last night of a video a group of black teens in Chicago beating and torturing a mentally disabled white man while railing against Donald Trump and white people in general, Glenn Beck posted a tweet baselessly linking the attack to the Black Lives Matters movement:
You are right. Stand up with me and demand justice in Chicago for the beating of a disabled trump supporter by BLM https://t.co/aP79pKnHA1
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) January 5, 2017
Beck’s effort to blame the attack on BLM understandably generated media coverage, which he addressed on his radio program today by initially insisting that he was simply asking “if this story was true” before asserting that now that we know it really happened, “we have to assign some blame to the leadership of Black Lives Matters.”
Beck said that if he or the Tea Party are going to be blamed “for every coarse word said in society,” then “Black Lives Matter cannot be held innocent” in this case.
“We have to assign some blame to the leadership of Black Lives Matter who are saying these things,” Beck said, “who are saying ‘death to whitey,’ who are talking about all of this. You have to assign something to the bleed-over in culture if you’re going to do that to the Tea Party or me.”
Beck then falsely claimed that he never linked BLM to the attack but merely asked if reports, which he did not cite, that the perpetrators were BLM activists were true.
“That’s why I put ‘if’ in this,” he said. “It was reported. Is it fake? If it’s true. I don’t know.”
Eventually, Beck and his cohosts figured out the chain of events that resulted in his tweet linking the video to BLM, which prompted Beck to assert that he had seen articles reporting that there was a BLM link to the attack at the time he sent out his tweet while insisting that the BLM movement has been widely associated with violence.
“There were five police officers that were killed at a BLM rally here in Dallas,” Beck said, ignoring the fact that the shooting was roundly condemned by BLM leaders “They have a history of promoting death to the police. That’s what I was saying to this person is, ‘Stand up, you’re right, but it’s not just Donald Trump, if that’s what you believe, it’s the other side too.'”
