Two notable things in the wake of Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally this weekend, at which the Fox News host declared that America needs to reject hate and “turn back to God”:
1. While official crowd estimates are notoriously tricky—and subsequently inaccurate—a nonpartisan approximation commissioned by CBS News puts the rally’s attendance at 87,000, about 20,000 less than the capacity of Penn State’s football stadium. Earlier news estimates had put attendance at around 300,000, while the event’s organizers had guessed half a million, naturally.
2. Closely following his very public call to end divisiveness on Saturday, Beck told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace that he regrets saying President Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Chastising his own “big fat mouth,” Beck then said he’d misconstrued Obama’s adherence to “liberation theology” as racism: “He is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology—which is oppressor and victim,” said Beck. “Racist was, first of all, shouldn't have been said. It was poorly said.”
-Cord Jefferson is a staff writer at The Root. Follow him on Twitter.