Month: December 2016

Rush Limbaugh and Chris Plante demonstrate how they lure their listeners into an inescapable Manichean world of fantasy.

The first audio comes from the Rush Limbaugh program that aired on December 5, 2016 (transcript below and at the link). Here are the cliff notes, drawn directly from the transcript:

• The Obama stimulus in 2009 was not a stimulus. That was just rhetoric, and it was designed to fool people, low-information voters and others into thinking that $780 billion… Let’s use the term a trillion because that’s what it actually ended up being.
• So where does Obama get that trillion dollars to put into the private sector? He doesn’t have it. [So he takes it from the private sector.]
• Even if you’re printing it, or borrowing it, it’s still coming from the private sector and being put right back there. It’s nothing more… It was a scam. But it was a bigger scam than that because of where Obama stimulated. He stimulated unions! Seventy-five percent of that trillion dollars went to unions and union jobs to keep them employed during this recession. Why? Because union workers pay dues.
• What does the union do with the dues? A lot of that money is donated back to the Democrat Party, which is used for campaign commercials, campaign elections and so forth. It’s used to elect Democrats. In one sense, it was a circuitous money-laundering scheme.
• So Obama can’t go to the Treasury and withdraw a trillion dollars for the Democrat Party, but this was the next best thing.

Can you imagine how pissed off you’d be if this was true? That the Democrats took a trillion dollars in tax dollars, gave almost all of it to lazy union members (who are probably paid better than you, have better health insurance and retirement plans, and don’t work past 5 o’clock) and their corrupt bosses, and then got it back from the unions to support their re-election. If I didn’t know the truth*, I’d be white-hot with outrage (and rage). The picture he paints is utterly diabolical**.

Transcript:

Limbaugh: The Obama stimulus in 2009 was not a stimulus. That was just rhetoric, and it was designed to fool people, low-information voters and others into thinking that $780 billion… Let’s use the term a trillion because that’s what it actually ended up being. Obama created the notion, and the media helped, that a trillion dollars from somewhere was gonna be plugged into the private sector economy, and that that trillion dollars was gonna provide such a stimulus. New jobs! Economic growth! It was gonna be great; it was gonna be an automatic recovery mechanism from the Great Depression or Recession of 2008. But there wasn’t a trillion dollars sitting somewhere unused. We were, at the time, about, oh, 11 or $12 trillion in debt.

So where does Obama get that trillion dollars to put into the private sector? He doesn’t have it. We are in debt. He had one of two options. He could order the money printed, or he could get it from the private sector. In either case, that’s where it came from. The government does not produce anything. So Obama stimulating the U.S. economy with a trillion dollars is no stimulus at all because before Obama can get it… Well, more correctly said, before Obama can insert it into the economy, he has to take it from the economy.

So he gets a trillion dollars from the economy and then puts it back? There’s no stimulus. There’s no growth. There’s no additional money floating around, unless they printed it. And that’s his point. If they printed the trillion dollars, then they vastly increased the supply of dollars, which reduced the value of dollars, but there wasn’t a trillion dollars lying around someplace unused that we could put into the economy and have that trillion dollars added, because it had to come out.

Even if you’re printing it, or borrowing it, it’s still coming from the private sector and being put right back there. It’s nothing more… It was a scam. But it was a bigger scam than that because of where Obama stimulated. He stimulated unions! Seventy-five percent of that trillion dollars went to unions and union jobs to keep them employed during this recession. Why? Because union workers pay dues. They don’t pay dues when they’re unemployed. When they’re employed, they’re paying dues. The dues go to the union.

What does the union do with the dues? A lot of that money is donated back to the Democrat Party, which is used for campaign commercials, campaign elections and so forth. It’s used to elect Democrats. In one sense, it was a circuitous money-laundering scheme. Go get a trillion dollars from the Treasury, stimulate unions by giving it to public employee unions and teacher unions — and you go state by state, and you’ll find out where the money went. In Wisconsin, most of it went to teachers unions. In California, a mixture of teachers and public works unions.

And a portion of that is gonna be donated right back to the Democrat Party. So Obama can’t go to the Treasury and withdraw a trillion dollars for the Democrat Party, but this was the next best thing.

This next clip from Chris Plante, demonstrates how right-wing radio traps their listeners in a closed loop mental prison.***

Transcript:

Plante: What’s your take on all of this, Russia hacking, and what do you think happened, what do you think is happening right now and what ought to happen as we proceed as a nation? 888-630-9625. Let’s go to Cathy in the Commonwealth of Virginia, Cathy, you’re on the Chris Plante Show.

Cathy: Good morning Chris

Plante: Good morning Cathy

Cathy: I have been twitching at all this Russia stuff because first of all, if we really think Russia is as smart as they are then they wouldn’t leave their signature on any type of action. The agencies that were supposed to know about this didn’t, and the ones that did weren’t supposed to be in it, so… all that left to the side, my mind just goes to the fact that I want to know why Russia would want Trump in office. He is a strong defender of America – America First. Why wouldn’t they want little Miss Reset Button to take the oval office, I mean that would be so much easier for them. Nobody has explained why.

Plante: Well I’ve heard one theory that’s been thrown out there and that is that Vladimir Putin is angry with Hillary Clinton because when she was Secretary of State, the United States, the Obama administration, the Hillary Clinton State Department allegedly contributed to or was in some fashion behind the anti-Putin protests in Moscow and that he holds a grudge. Now this is one theory. I’ve heard the news media peddling it, I haven’t heard anybody else peddle it but news media and a couple of Democrats, but I repeat myself. So… It sounds like you’re skeptical.

Cathy: I’m more than skeptical. I think it’s, it’s…

Plante: Why? Why are you so skeptical?

Cathy: Because the media is saying so, number one.

Plante: Because what?

Cathy: If the media says so, I’m not listening.

Plante: Yeah, you’ve got to assume that they are advancing a political agenda rather than reporting the news.

Did you catch that? “If the media says so, I’m not listening.”

The only way many of your friends and neighbors will believe anything at all is if Rush Limbaugh tells them it’s so. To these folks, if it wasn’t on Fox News, it’s fake news.

This kind of oblivious circular thinking is characteristic of many, many people on the right. Did you catch it the first time? Cathy said, “if we really think Russia is as smart as they are then they wouldn’t leave their signature on any type of action.” In other words, if Russia got caught, then it couldn’t have been Russia because Russia would never do anything we’d catch. Sheesh… If I’m Russia, I’d want to live in a world full of Cathy’s (but only as long as Rush Limbaugh wasn’t telling her I was the enemy).

So that’s what we’re up against: Masterful storytellers that have captured the trust of their listeners and sealed up their listener’s minds so much that the audience is impermeable to outside influence.

More on what to do about it soon…

More on Russia soon…

*According to the conservative Peter G. Peterson Foundation and Wikipedia, the stimulus was ~$850B, ~1/3 of it was tax cuts, about ~1/2 of it extended unemployment benefits and helped the states fund their Medicare and Medicaid programs, and about 1/2 of the remaining $150 billion or so was used for capital purchases, leaving, at most, ~$70 billion that could have been spent on actual labor, both unionized and not.

**If you are a Democrat that happens to live in Wisconsin or North Carolina or New Jersey, you probably know white-hot outrage (and rage) well. If you don’t live in one of those states, this story about Barbara and Neil always works for me. Truly diabolical, eh?

***Talk radio is an important part of the conservative lying apparatus, but of course Fox News, chain emails and propaganda websites like Brietbart and Gateway Pundit are essential to the brainwashing.

I’m not going to pretend as if I wasn’t just as surprised as anyone else at the election results. All the talk of HRC “running up the score” and locking up Florida with the early vote and her ground game vs. Trump’s utter lack of organization, and just the endless litany of Trump assaults on civilization… not to mention the idea of having a chance to shatter the glass ceiling…

Well… Taken together, I went into election day looking forward to another route akin to 2008. I was even hopeful we’d see a Democratic House and Senate come Wednesday morning.

Alas… Hindsight can be a bitch. Maybe I just didn’t want to see it, but it should have been more clear that the right wing base was a restlessly sleeping beast.

WMAL is my local conservative talk radio station. Aside from Limbaugh, Savage and Levin, they air a morning program hosted by Brian Wilson and Larry O’Connor. Before WMAL, Wilson was the Washington bureau chief for Fox News. O’Connor was an editor at Breitbart News until (how’s this for irony) he was released from his contract after credulously re-reporting a fake news story about Paul Krugman.

I could be wrong, but my hunch is that a lot of “serious progressives” sorta sneer at right wing talk radio as some sort of entertainment for the great unwashed mass of the GOP base. The medium is just such an insult to their intelligence that they cannot imagine that the stand-up Republicans they know as neighbors or co-workers could possibly be listeners. I suspect that a lot of folks believe talk radio is a medium for truck drivers, flyover state farmers, and tradesmen that spend a lot of time in their trucks or workshops.

Anyone that believes that needs to listen to this:

This was too long for me to transcribe, but if you couldn’t listen, the clip is a recording of Brian Wilson sharing a story of his weekend. He had attended a blue-grass concert and when he was brought to his VIP section, he discovered his seat was adjacent to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s. Enthralled, he introduced himself and was surprised when Scalia told him no introduction was necessary because he and his wife tuned into his program every morning.

Did you catch that? One of our country’s (for better or for worse… ok, for worse… much, much worse…) most influential jurists of the century got his news (and presumably a good portion of his worldview) from a two right wing talk radio show hosts: One was a Breitbart editor, the other was a former Fox News anchor and bureau chief.

Just 4 years later, and Breitbart’s CEO is in the White House as a top advisor (the same role Karl Rove was in) to the President of the United States. And the Vice-President of the United States was himself a former right-wing talk radio show host.

Right wing talk radio is not a joke. It’s time folks start paying attention to it. The most powerful people in the world certainly are.

Over the weekend Trump’s camp leaked its expected nominee for Secretary of State. Rex Tillerson is Exxon’s CEO. His mentor and predecessor, Lee Raymond, had this to say about Exxon and its relationship with the United States:

“I’m not a U.S. company, and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”

The context for that quote was that Raymond saw Exxon as an enduring institution that would last beyond any presidency and, probably, even beyond the lifetime of the United States. With that in mind, nation-states do not matter to Exxon – only their global ambitions as applied to the prosperity of the corporation matter. Put another way, the United States is important to Exxon only insomuch as the country adds to or subtracts from its bottom line and long term prospects.

If he is nominated, the first questions Tillerson should be asked at his hearings are:
A) if he believed Exxon’s interests trump those of the United States; and,
B) if he can and will, instantly upon taking office, switch his highest loyalties from Exxon to the United States.

The questions are not academic.

Tillerson was “hand-picked” by Raymond.

LEE RAYMOND, the combative chairman of Exxon Mobil, could be the most successful oilman in a century. During his decade and a half at the helm, his firm—a direct descendant of the original Standard Oil Trust founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1882—has outperformed its peers on almost every financial measure. The oil titan will finally step down at the end of 2005 in favour of Rex Tillerson, a company insider who is his hand-picked successor.

Before assuming the helm at Exxon, Tillerson was responsible for developing business in Russia.

He and Putin go way back. His ExxonMobil biography concludes with this gem: “In 2013, he was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation.”

[…]

Tillerson rose to the top of ExxonMobil based on his performance running the corporation’s Russia account, often negotiating directly with Putin during the last decade.

In 2011, Tillerson inked what may be the largest oil deal in history at Vladimir Putin’s Sochi palace.

The Arctic well will be among the most expensive Exxon has ever drilled, costing at least $600 million. The spending is justified by the potential prize. Universitetskaya, the geological structure being drilled, is the size of the city of Moscow and large enough to contain more than 9 billion barrels, a trove worth more than $900 billion at today’s prices.

But after Putin annexed Crimea from the Ukraine, the United States imposed sanctions that hit Exxon’s bottom line.

Exxon Mobil said in a 10-k filing with the SEC on Wednesday that it lost a maximum of $1 billion from sanctions. In July 2014, the European Union and United States imposed sanctions on the Russian energy sector. The West believes Russia is behind much of the civil unrest in eastern Ukraine. Sanctions began in March 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a Black Sea peninsula that was once part of Ukraine. But the punishment was kicked up a notch in July with sanctions banning American companies from doing business with Russian oil and gas drillers. That hurt a new $723 million joint venture between Exxon and Rosneft , Russia’s largest state owned oil company. This year, the two companies were to start drilling for oil in the Kara Sea, located in the Arctic Circle in northern Russia.

Those sanctions remain in place, and Tillerson objects.

At the time, Tillerson expressed doubt that sanctions would prove an effective foreign policy tool.

“We don’t find them to be effective unless they are very well implemented,” Tillerson said at the company’s May 2014 shareholders meeting. Authorities imposing the sanctions should consider “who are they really harming?”

Any President is owed deference when it comes to his Cabinet picks. At the same time, the patriotism of our nation’s Secretary of State must be utterly beyond question. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Tillerson meets that standard..

As promised, I’m posting some of today’s Rush Limbaugh program. This will be a regular feature because I think it si critical that the media and everyone else realize that so-called “fake news” isn’t anything novel. Rush Limbaugh has been an absolute savant when it comes to twisting and exaggerating and manufacturing facts. By the end of one of his programs, his listeners are actually left with a net negative working knowledge of politics. Daily listeners build up that deficit until they inhabit a dangerous fantasy world filled with all manner of hatred and evil liberals.

Last night Farheed Zakaria hosted a two-hour special review of the Barack Obama presidency. Inevitably, Republican obstruction was discussed. Here’s Limbaugh’s reaction.

Transcript: [Zakaria] pontificated as ominous music played, ‘Did race play a role in the brick wall of Republican resistance to Barack Obama?'” Mr. Zakaria, there wasn’t any resistance. That’s not quite the…

There was all kinds of resistance. But not official. The Republicans announced every year they weren’t gonna oppose Obama. The Republicans made it clear they were not going to try to stop Obama, not legislatively. Now, you might have had individual Republicans out on TV criticizing Obama, but there wasn’t any opposition to him. It’s the exact opposite. Mr. Zakaria, if you want to bring in the racial component here, what you’re gonna have to admit is that the race of President Obama paralyzed this country.

It paralyzed legitimate criticism of the president of the United States. It amplified malcontent operations like Black Lives Matter. It gave rise to a thugocracy, and nobody had the guts to speak out against it for fear of what would happen to them. And it’s not just they were afraid of being called racist. It was what would happen to them by Black Lives Matter or whoever if anybody got wind of what they were saying.

As outrageous and racist as it is, let’s leave the BLM scare-mongering aside for the moment, though that is a critical component of many conservative’s worldview. Instead, here is Michael Grunwald in Time describing the GOP strategy for dealing with the overwhelming majorities Obama enjoyed in his first months in office:

But McConnell believed Republicans had nothing to gain from me-too-ism. He reminded his caucus that Republicans wouldn’t pay a price for opposing Obama’s plan if it succeeded, because politicians get re-elected in good times. But if the economy didn’t revive, they could return from the political wilderness in 2010. “He wanted everyone to hold the fort,” Voinovich later explained. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.”

The Republican strategy on the stimulus was as simple as it was clever. The Obama plan had $300 billion worth of tax cuts, plus all kinds of spending that had enjoyed some bipartisan support: unemployment benefits, infrastructure, research and much more. It even included the Race to the Top education reforms, anathema to Democratic teachers’ unions. But the GOP message never wavered: Big Government, big spending, big mess.

Inside the leadership team, though, there were tensions between Cantor, who wanted to put Republican politics first, and GOP conference chairman Mike Pence of Indiana, who wanted to put ideological conservatism first. Ultimately, the Republicans fell off both sides of the horse. The official $478 billion GOP alternative was a Pence-style ideological bill, consisting entirely of tax cuts and unemployment benefits. But Republicans also crafted a Cantor-style political bill, a $715 billion substitute with even more traditional infrastructure than the Democratic bill. Most House Republicans–including Ryan–voted for both. They never did explain how their stimulus could be good public policy while Obama’s similar $787 billion stimulus was freedom-crushing socialism, but their no vote was unanimous. “The caucus had decided we weren’t going to give Obama a bipartisan victory on this,” recalls moderate Republican Mike Castle of Delaware.

[…]

The stimulus debate established the pattern for the next four years. Republicans opposed the entire Obama agenda–a health care plan based on Romney’s, a cap-and-trade regime that McCain had supported in 2008, financial reform after a financial meltdown. Obama squeezed his health care and Wall Street reform bills through Congress anyway, but the quest for 60 votes in the Senate forced him to cut deals that made his initiatives look ugly. And the Tea Party–which held its first rally 10 days after Obama signed the stimulus–became a powerful force opposing the Obama agenda, and a double-edged sword for Washington Republicans.

Later in his program, Limbaugh told his listeners that Trump’s opposition were uncomfortable with the slogan “Make America Great Again” because they believe it to be code for advocating the re-imposition of slavery. (A classic conservative dodge is to pretend that Jim Crow and post-slavery racism never existed). Here’s Limbaugh’s take on race and white supremacy:

Transcript: …and the left looks at people by group, by the way. We don’t. They do.

[…]

Logic would say there aren’t enough white supremacists, but are there any? When you get right down to it, white supremacists? I mean, you could put ’em in a phone booth, for crying out loud. However, there are black supremacists. There are all kinds of minority supremacists, and they are perfectly fine in that state, according to the left. But whenever white people happen to vote their interests, have you picked up on the fact that that’s somehow illegitimate? But when any minority votes its interests, whether it be economic or cultural, when any minority votes its interests, why that’s perfectly fine, it’s justifiable, makes perfect sense. When white people do it, it’s unacceptable, it’s white supremacism, and it’s racism.

That, my friends, aside from being self-contradictory, is rhetoric straight out of the Alt-Right/White Supremacists fever swamps. It’s a very rich white man embracing his race and claiming victimhood.

At this very moment I’m listening to Rush Limbaugh vehemently argue that for the duration of his presidency, Barack Obama enjoyed the full cooperation of Congressional Republicans. Opposition to his agenda was impossible, according to Rush, because of his race. Republicans were afraid to fight him or criticize him, because they were afraid of the fate that would befall them at the hands of Black Lives Matter.

I’ll post the audio and relevant portions of the transcript later tonight, but for now I want to elaborate on one of yesterday’s posts. Here’s what I wrote:

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.

I didn’t write enough about this whole “fake news” idea. Yes, there are new channels of distribution and new creative digital pulp writers filling them. But take a moment to reread (and later to hear) Rush Limbaugh’s argument at the top of this post. According to Rush, Obama’s race protected him from criticism. Moreover, Obama was able to accomplish his entire agenda because Republicans were afraid to oppose him – because of his race.

The truth?

That was September 9, 2009. (And Obama wasn’t lying, which means, of course, that Joe Wilson, the heckler Congressman, was.)

Anyway, there has been plenty written about Mitch McConnell’s unrelenting obstruction strategy in political magazines and deep within 40 paragraph analysis articles in a few of America’s newspapers. Politically active liberals know the lengths the GOP went to hamstring Obama throughout both of his terms.*

But most Democrats do not. They may be aware that things haven’t progressed under Obama the way they’d like, but they don’t know why. They chalk it up to politics and Washington D.C. and how it doesn’t really matter who you vote for because nothing really changes but, you know, Democrats are for the working class, Republicans are for the rich, so if I vote I’ll vote for the Democrats, but it’s probably not worth it to take the time off work to go stand in the lines because it won’t affect my life anyway…

On the other hand, your conservative Uncle Hermann is adamant that Barack Obama controlled the federal government for 8 years and used his power to “fundamentally transform America” for the worst. He’s convinced Obama did that with the assistance of a bunch of feckless Republicans in congress who were so afraid to criticize Obama because of his race that they cooperated with the President’s agenda every step of the way.

The point I’m making is that talk radio plays a crucial role in establishing powerful narratives in the minds of the GOP base. The Democratic base has nothing equivalent.

I’m not sure what Democrats could build to engage their base more fully. I think probably unions are key. But that’s not my expertise.

On the other hand, the only thing I know to do about the Republican hold on talk radio is to fight it. For me that begins with paying attention, evangelizing among other politically engaged liberals, and highlighting the truly absurd and offensive content that most of middle America isn’t exposed to (Like Rush Limbaugh with Sandra Fluke**, or Chris Plante with Ellen Degeneres).

* this was one of many true failures of the national press. The American political system is set up with two great centers of power – the Presidency and the Congress. Either one can check the other, almost at will. When the two are in opposition and nothing is moving, that’s the political story of the era. There should have been a running tally of filibusters (and Obama vetoes), with the most important stalled legislation explained. Instead, filibusters became some for of anti-news and were ignored by the press. In reality, their strategy made the obstructing Senators at least as powerful as the President, at least in terms of law-making.

** After Donald Trump, Limbaugh’s Fluke comments sound relatively anodyne, don’t they? That’s another reason I think right wing talk is about to get a lot more coarse. There’s both hazard and opportunity there. Opportunity in that they are bound to overreach and 2018 elections may surprise a lot of people. The hazard is in that a lot of right-wing news consumers occupy a grey area between sane and not. The nasty rhetoric will, I fear, often become one too many straws on the camel’s back.

[UPDATE 12-8-2016 14:22]
I just hit publish and Rush just went on a rant saying that you can fit the number of American white supremacists in a phone booth – they simply don’t exist. On the other hand, this country is overflowing with black supremacists. Check back later and I’ll have the audio for you.

Chris Plante, broadcast by WMAL in Washington D.C., called Ellen Degeneres an Obama “suck-up, a fluffer,” on his November 23 program.

Plante has always been one of the more odious talkers, which is probably why he just scored a national syndication deal with Westwood One Radio Network.

The hatred and bullying and juvenile glee conservatives take in picking on various minorities is very real. I couldn’t help but to think of this as I wrote this post:

Three defendants in gay-bashing case may plead guilty

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.