A long time ago, I ran CallingAllWingnuts.com, a talk radio blog. The basic idea was that I would call one of the hosts (O’Reilly and Limbaugh were favorite targets), utter some honest words that contradicted and corrected whatever it was they were lying about that day, record the exchange and publish it for all posterity. Sometimes the results were entertaining, and the CallingAllWingnuts grew quickly.
Alas, life intervened. I moved to Virginia, graduated law school, had a couple of kids… and eventually accepted that I could no longer commit ~8 hrs/day to the content production required to maintain my hopping little corner of the internet.
At the same time, the world of digital politics was changing rapidly. Barack Obama’s election seemed to sap the Netroots of much of its vitality – the villains didn’t seem as threatening when your President was saying nice things about them. Many of the more obnoxious and confrontational bloggers and activists (and I was certainly one of them) were marginalized.
Shit happened. I still did stuff. Quite a lot, actually.
Eight years passed.
And then Trump won.
Not only is there a new bad guy in town, but his posse is pretty big too. It’s like 2003 all over again: Trump/Bannon in the White House (with Pence as stalking horse), Ryan barely holding the reins of his Freedom Caucus in the House, and McConnell trying to get his Rasputin on over in the Senate.
But wait, there’s more…
The media has the vapors. With a truly mythic lack of self-awareness, the purveyors of truth ask, “By golly, how could someone like Donald Trump have possibly captured the most powerful office in the world?” Their colleagues cut in to credulously offer a breaking report: “Donald Trump just tweeted, `I just got off the phone with God (the Christian one), who told me I am absolutely spectacular and totally awesome!`”
If you were paying attention through George W. Bush’s two terms, this kind of coverage should strike you as an echo of 2000-2005. It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina that the media finally began covering the GOP with the kind of scrutiny their offices and power merited. And I think it can safely be said that it will be at least a year or two before the media accurately reports on the imminent disaster that is about to be the Trump administration.
And more…
In all the post-election analysis, naval gazing, blame-casting and caterwauling, there’s been much said about “fake news”.
As if this is a new thing.
As if “death panels” and “FEMA internment camps” and various signs of the apocalypse haven’t been slathered across Fox News, talk radio, the Drudge Report and your Aunt Abigail’s emails for the last two decades. The only difference between the fake news of 2008 and the fake news of 2016 is that the revenue stream has been democratized. It seems all the billions of dollars unleashed by Citizens United have overtopped the dam. You don’t have to be Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh anymore – there’s enough money in the pot for even the rankest of amateurs to publish their fever dreams (sincerely believed or not) and get paid.
But… Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin remain elite persuaders and dark sorcerers of political messaging. They and their lesser minions remain enormously important to the conservative movement. Their role if defining conservative “truth” and “news” must not be underappreciated.
I haven’t thought this all the way through yet, but their role, it seems to me, is at least two-fold.
The most obvious utility for conservative talk radio is conservative messaging. If you are reading this entry, you probably agree with me that the balance of evidence demonstrates that the truth is liberal. In other words, the truth derived from provable facts will generally lead us to liberal policy outcomes. So the conservative talk radio host’s job is to create a new version of the truth that supports a conservative government. So you hear policy argument like, “…a higher minimum wage costs jobs… lowering taxes will erase the deficit… voter fraud is out of control… regulations burden small businesses…”
The other role conservative talk radio plays is more insidious and more pernicious. For much of America, Limbaugh and Plante and Hannity define the Democratic brand (or in their words, which ring particularly hollow now as the popular vote continues to come in, the Democrat brand). Democrats are the godless health care rationers, the gun-grabbers, the baby-killers, the tax-and-spenders, the election cheaters and the perverted and the corrupt.
There is not a place in the United States free of the mind-rotting broadcast drivel. In a country where so many elites and institutions have failed, it’s difficult for me to blame listeners. Their anger is authentic and they have plenty of cause for it. What is not defensible is allowing them to be seduced by a bunch of grifting liars and propagandists. There’s just too much to lose to go down without a fight.
So welcome to CallingAllWingnuts, reborn. If you see something you like, I hope you’ll tweet it, email it, or somehow find a way to share it with you conservative Uncle Herman.