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.