Just a little. I’m pretty wimpy.
I’ve been saying for awhile now that I wanted to do some posts about the various sources I’ve run across, good and bad, since I got started reading about political matters this summer. Originally I envisioned some sort of annotated list, but my ideas have expanded quite a bit since then. I just had no idea what all was out there. (“Out there” would be a good description for some of them.) I was, of course, familiar with Rush Limbaugh, and indeed had had a brief time about a decade ago when I listened to him during lengthy commutes. It didn’t take me long to get completely disgusted with him, though. And I had read something about Alex Jones during that same time, I believe in a Washington Post Magazine article, that painted him as a loony but basically harmless all-night call-in radio broadcaster. And I had heard of Breitbart, I think from some forwarded material. They seemed a bit . . . extreme.
When I started getting interested in the election, I simply googled “conservatives against Trump.” All of a sudden I was finding great material from The Federalist, and National Review, and RedState, and HotAir, and The Resurgent. I discovered Jennifer Rubin’s “Right Turn” blog at The Washington Post. I got re-acquainted with George Will. And somehow I lucked into Thabiti Anyabwile’s articles on The Gospel Coalition blog. Great stuff. Not everyone on the big conservative news websites was necessarily against Trump, but there was very little of this Our Great Leader stuff. Most of what I ran into was on the side of reason, judgment, and solid analysis. Many of the writers were unwilling to vote for either main-party candidate, which I thought then, and still think now, was misguided, but there were a few Hamiltonian voices here and there. It was a joy to find all of these great people out there, giving serious thought to America’s issues and refusing to be suckered.
But then there were the others. The ones that were down there in the underbrush, or maybe the underbelly. I kept running into material from some website called WorldNetDaily, which carried some pretty cockamamie stuff. And somebody called The Gateway Pundit. And then there were the openly neo-Nazi sites, such as Stormfront. I guess I was pretty naive up until then. If anyone had asked me, I would have said before this summer that I didn’t believe there was really much of a forum for these fringe types. Ha. Was I wrong!
Recently I became aware of someone called Michael Savage, a talk-show host several notches below Rush Limbaugh in popularity but with a pretty substantial audience. He writes books and runs a website in addition to the radio show, which is called “Savage Nation.” His three-word motto is “Borders. Language. Culture.” I decided to do a little poking around in his material just to see what he was up to.
First of all, his real name isn’t Michael Savage. It’s Michael Alan Weiner. Sorry, but I just have to laugh. I guess “Weiner Nation” didn’t quite have the right ring to it. Under his real name, using his credentials earned with master’s degrees from the University of Hawaii in medical botany and medical anthropology and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in nutritional ethnomedicine, whatever that may be, he has written books on nutrition, herbal medicine, and homeopathy. Then at some point he changed his focus, adopted his new professional name, and went all populist-nationalist.
Okay. I decided to sample his latest book, Scorched Earth, and listen to some of his radio show. The Kindle sample available on Amazon and about ten minutes of his Dec. 30 radio show gave me more than enough material for this article. You may say that this small sample size is unfair. How could I possibly get an overall sense of his ideas from these snatches?
Believe me when I say: Yes I can.
So Savage (I guess I’ll call him that—I can’t go through the rest of this post calling him Weiner) is on the Barack-Obama-is-the-Devil-incarnate team. No, really. He has actually said, “Barack Obama is the Devil.” He calls him a “demon” in the first few minutes of his final 2016 broadcast. I guess he means that literally. Don’t think he’d be too happy to have to face a real one. Here are some representative quotations:
“Who do you fear more, Obama or Putin?”
“Politicians like Obama are more dangerous than gangsters.”
“There’s a method to [Obama’s] evil madness.”
“Doesn’t matter where he was born or not born.”
“He’s an active demon . . .He’s still demonically trying to destroy America and the rest of the world.”
Remember, these priceless gems are from the first minutes of this one broadcast. What does he do, just repeat these things endlessly? Note the Birther reference and the Putin positivity. (By the way, he does throw out an interesting idea: that Obama is setting himself up to be the head of the UN. So there’s a mind underneath all that blather. Theories have been floated that Savage is simply putting on an act, just as Rush Limbaugh has come to do. I don’t think the guy is stupid, at all. That’s pretty scary!)
Let’s get some commentary on President Obama from a solid conservative writer over on HotAir.com, the almost-always-right-on-the-money-but-for-some-reason-anonymous Allahpundit:
Obama thought he could bring Russia to the table because he seemed to believe that anti-Americanism abroad was driven chiefly by upset at Bush’s policies. A new multilateralist president, one who prided himself on appearing “reasonable” and interested in dialogue, would get further. That is to say, and true to form, Obama’s “reset” had less to do with any personal regard for Putin (or his puppet Medvedev in 2009) than for his own abilities. Of course he would broker better relations with Russia; he’s Barack Obama. He’s been getting pantsed by Putin ever since. But, and here’s the key point, he never denied that he or the United States had deep differences with the Kremlin on international policy or on human rights. He was just really, really bad at maneuvering to advance our side of those differences. (emphasis mine, from Allahpundit’s 12/30/16 column, so the same day as MS’s demon rant).
See how this works? You actually deal with facts, and you evaluate issues based on those facts. (AP goes on to wonder, as I do, why Trump is so adoring of Putin, a topic I addressed yesterday, but that adoration is not my focus here. And seriously–isn’t the word “pantsed” just so, so great?)
The opening salvo of Scorched Earth, by the way, says that Barack Obama is a Muslim, because his father was a Muslim, and you inherit your Muslimity through the paternal line, and he, that is, Michael Savage the all-knowing, never heard of Obama’s converting to Christianity, except that he, that is, Obama, attended Jeremiah Wright’s church, which is a Christian church, not a mosque, but other than that who can say? Savage leaves out some rather important points, such as that this idea of “inheriting” one’s Muslim faith is not at all widely accepted as fact in Islamic circles, that Obama’s father had minimal contact with him, and, most important here, that Barack Obama Sr. was not a practicing Muslim as an adult but was an atheist. His father, that is, Barack Obama’s grandfather, was apparently a practicing Muslim, by the way, but no one’s saying the Muslim inheritance can jump a generation. Savage almost certainly got his confident identification of Obama as a Muslim from Franklin Graham, who said almost exactly the same thing in 2010 and whose statement was debunked for the reasons I just gave. It ain’t hard to find this stuff, folks!
I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone can listen to Michael Savage’s daily radio show, but millions of people do. His tone is a weird mixture of self-aggrandizement and self-pity. He says, about the fact that he has not one but two books about come out, one “the God book” and the other about Trump (hope he’s not equating the two): ‘People ask, “How does he do it?” I tell them, “It’s what I do. . . . How does anyone who has an active intellect turn it off?”’ He also tells us that he’s a “complicated human being” and that “All of my moods and emotions are just below the surface.” He sounds eerily like the President elect, to be honest.
It’s all part of the “why reason when you can rant” school and the cult of personality. I guess we can’t bring back William F. Buckley Jr., but surely we can do better than this!