Beck is back!

He was instrumental in the radicalizing of the same right wing that is now worshipping at the feet of a demagogic billionaire named Trump. They may have been extreme before, but Beck unleashed the beast. He has since recanted much of his behavior during the Fox years, much of which bordered on incoherent lunacy, by saying that he “made an awful lot of mistakes” because he “played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.” You might say that.

His atonement has led him down a different path, one on which he’s less of a mass culture phenomenon and more of a cult leader. His transformation actually started before he left Fox News, when he began organizing rallies. The first big one was in 2010, the “Restoring Honor” rally. Originally conceived as a political event, Beck had some sort of revelation a few months before and changed it to a fundraising rally for veterans, as well as a quasi-religious meeting featuring some of the far-right religious crackpots with whom he would become increasingly involved over the next few years. This event was huge; according to some estimates it drew as many as 300,000 people. Sarah Palin was the star attraction.

As it came on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, it also led to Beck’s bizarre ongoing appropriation of Dr. King’s legacy for his own purposes. (He’s not the only conservative to do this, of course, but he’s one of the few to make a huge profit at it.) And he’s still at it. Last weekend, he really made it sing: He held his annual rally (yes, he does this every year) in Birmingham Alabama. Twenty thousand people showed up to march with him on the historic civil rights route from Kelly Ingram Park to Birmingham City Hall, holding all the same pre-made signs with pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas, and the sayings “God Is the Answer,” “All Lives Matter,” “Unity,” “Justice,” “Courage” and “Right of Conscience.” T-Shirts were printed with the words “Never Again is Now” which apparently refers to Beck’s campaign to raise money for persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

Beck is now a holy man, spreading the good word of God, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, a racial healer and a stalwart defender of justice and equality. (All lives matter, darn it!) Needless to say, “right of conscience” refers to the God-given right to discriminate and “never again is now” is a pretty crude allusion to the Holocaust. It’s a perfect Beckian mishmash of appropriated liberal sacred cows and conservative bigotry wrapped up in sanctimony, vanity and intellectual dissonance. For some reason there are a substantial number of people who find that to be inspiring. And they’re willing to pay for it.