Sirius XM suspended Glenn Beck’s radio program over guest’s comments that suggested an attack on Donald Trump. Brad Thor, a writer, said last week, Mediaite reported (transcript here):
“This is serious and this could bring down incredible heat on me because I’m about to suggest something very bad. It is a hypothetical I am going to ask as a thriller writer…If Congress won’t remove him from office, what patriot will step up and do that if he oversteps his mandate as president?”
SiriusXM said in a statement to Breitbart that the comments “may be reasonably construed by some to have been advocating harm against an individual currently running for office, which we cannot and will not condone.”
“For that reason, we have suspended The Glenn Beck Program from our Patriot channel for the coming week and are evaluating its place in our lineup going forward,” the statement goes on.
In a statement on Beck’s website, the Glenn Beck Radio Program‘s general manager Dom Theodore said Beck is on vacation and that Beck “has never – and will never – advocate violence.” Beck shared Theodore’s post on social media.
“His interview with Brad Thor speaks for itself,” Theodore said. “You can listen to it in its entirety here.”
Theodore argued that the blowback to the interview is a “viral hatchet job” of an out-of-context hypothetical by Beck’s guest writer Brad Thor. “Glenn is on the record, repeatedly, expressing concern for all people, especially the President of the United States,” Theodore said.
Thor, the author whose comments to Beck sparked the controversy, told Beck’s conservative news site The Blaze that he wasn’t calling for an assassination but instead was arguing “If we had to unseat a president without the backing of the Congress, we would need a patriot along the lines of George Washington to lead the country from tyranny back to liberty.”