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In a message posted to Facebook over the weekend, conservative commentator Glenn Beck told his legion of right-leaning followers that opposing Donald Trump in the presidential election was a “moral, ethical choice,” even if it means a victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Beck’s comments come in the wake of the release of an 11-year old tape in which Trump brags about how his wealth and fame allow him to sexually assault women with impunity.
Instead of voting Trump, Beck is backing Constitution Party candidate Darrell Castle.
Over the course of the election cycle, Beck has never jumped aboard the Trump train, supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz instead.
Beck expanded on his Facebook post in a recent interview with Vice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=074nDivCk6c
“I will tell you that it has crossed my mind … to vote for Hillary. I think Donald Trump is so unstable and so dangerous, that it has crossed my mind,” he explained. “I can’t do it because she’s just a horse of a different color. She’s just as bad.”
“They’re both bad,” Beck continued. “I think, under Hillary Clinton, the nation most likely could become run by oligarchs. I think under Donald Trump, he’s so unstable, I wouldn’t put anything past him. I don’t know what our country looks like.”
While he sees how other people could vote for Clinton, Beck himself won’t pull the lever for the former secretary of state. “If Donald Trump wins, it’s going to be a snowball to hell,” Beck told the crowd at a Cruz campaign event in Iowa early this year.
For infrequent consumers of Beck’s content, this divergence from the Republican party line may seem unexpected, but Beck has become a far more conciliatory figure than he was in his days on Fox News. He admitted that he was wrong, and liberals were right, when it came to the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, and, during an interview with hard-partying rocker Andrew W.K., acknowledged the role he personally played in the coarsening of American political discourse.
“I still believe in the things that I believe, I still believe in the Constitution, I don’t believe in the parties and I don’t believe in politics, but I do believe in freedom and justice and mercy and all those things,” Beck explained in a 2014 interview with the musician, whom Beck later gave a show on his radio network. “That what I felt I was fighting for, but I got lost in being a part of the problem. … I still believe in those things, but I don’t believe in the way we were trying to obtain those things.”
In a post on his website, Beck wrote, “It has been widely reported I am either endorsing or voting for Hillary Clinton as president, and I stated that voting for Hillary is the ‘the moral and ethical’ choice. Let me be clear (and thankfully this is an easy one to dispel): None of this is true.”
“I am firmly against both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as potential presidents of the United States of America,” he continued. “I believe that neither candidate has the values, decency or principles to be the leader of the free world. And for the millionth time (though I presume not the last), I reject the notion of a binary choice. I will not vote for the ‘lesser of two evils.”
Clarification: Beck does not support voting for Clinton. We have updated the headline and introduction to this article to more accurately convey Beck’s stance on the 2016 presidential race.