For months now, Glenn Beck has been mystified by the rise of Donald Trump and has been especially confused by the fact that many people in his listening audience seem to be backing the billionaire mogul despite the fact that he is a “progressive” who represents everything that Beck has been warning about for years.
Earlier this week, Beck had a discussion on his radio program with a longtime listener who sought to explain why he is supporting Trump. Despite his best efforts, Beck was simply unable to dissuade this caller from backing Trump and so, on Wednesday night, he brought a couple of “psychology experts” onto his television program to try to explain what is going on in the minds of Trump supporters.
During the course of the conversation, one of Beck’s guests made a comment about how, when people are fearful or in pain, they refuse to listen to logic or reason that contradicts or undermines their belief in whatever it is they hope will keep them safe.
As usual, Beck took this one piece of information that he only half-understood and managed to spin it out into a grand theory that explains everything that is going on and began telling his co-hosts on his radio program yesterday all about how this “door of disconnect” is the key to understanding what is happening with Trump supporters.
As Beck explained it, people on the right are understandably terrified about what is happening in the world because they have been paying attention to “the loss of our freedoms, the loss of our Constitution, the loss of our jobs, the loss of the Western way of life” for the last several years and many have become so overwhelmed that “they have now entered the door of disconnect” and are just reflexively backing Donald Trump in the hope that he can keep them safe.
“What the door of disconnect is, is a door between left brain and right brain,” he said. “Your reason is leading you to a place of such fear that you close a door and you say, ‘I’m not going there.’ And you find somebody that is talking to your passion and saying to you, ‘I will take care of you.’ And you put all of your support there.”
“And so when you attack that guy,” Beck continued, “and you attack him using facts, your brain automatically goes to that door where the facts are that you’ve already sealed off and you’re like, ‘I’m not looking at those, I don’t want to look at those, this guy is going to save me.’ And what you do is you stand and you bar that door of intellectual facts and intellectual arguments and you say, ‘I’m not going there. This guy is going to save us. You’re wrong!’ And you attack the person who is trying to come to you with facts.”
If we are to give Beck the benefit of the doubt and entertain the idea that this claptrap might actually explain what is going on, the only conclusion we can reach is that it is Beck himself who is ultimately responsible for turning so many of his listeners into ardent Trump supporters since he has spent the last several years whipping his audience into a frenzy of utter terror by constantly telling them that the entire world is about to go up in flames
