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rush limbaugh
Right-Wing Control of Media Has Crushed the Promise of US Democracy
If progressives want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
Jan 15, 2025
Republicans are using their massive structural media and social media advantage to try to destroy Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, and the California Democratic Party.
It follows an old script, that’s recently been played out in Russia and Hungary, among other nations: Want to seize control of a nation and turn it into a neofascist state with the consent of the people? Just take control of the channels of public information and news, and then turn lies about your opponents and their supporters into a perceived reality.
Over the past 50 years, Democrats have been busy focusing on and working out policies to benefit average Americans. Increasing access to medical care, $35 insulin, reducing student debt, the CFPB to protect people from banks, cleaning up the environment, American Rescue Act, Inflation Reduction Act, etc.
Republicans and billionaires aligned with them, however, have not only fought against all these efforts, but, far more importantly, have engaged in a massive power play to shift control of popular opinion — and thus control of our government — toward themselves in a way they believe could be permanent.
The plan for this wasn’t a secret; it was laid out in a 1971 memo by tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, who Richard Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972 where he could participate in putting the plan into action — as he did with the Buckley and Bellotti decisions (Powell wrote the latter) legalizing political bribery by saying “money is free speech” and “corporations are persons.”
It began the corruption of the American government by the Reagan administration.
But the details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
First, Republicans realized that public opinion drives everything, so they set out to seize as much control over the instrument that drives public opinion as they could: the media.
The details of the GOP’s efforts — which Democrats and wealthy Democratic donors should begin to emulate now if our republic is to survive — are rarely discussed. Here’s what they did, in outline, and how Democrats can fight back.
Second, they realized that the Senate was the power-based linchpin for control of the legislative branch and the key to controlling both the Executive and Judicial branches because only the Senate confirms presidential cabinet positions and federal judges.
If they controlled the Senate much of the time and occasionally got a Republican president, they could also easily stack both the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court.
To control the Senate, they knew, they had to control a majority of the states. And that came back to controlling public opinion through the media, particularly in low-population or largely rural states where media could be bought or coopted cheaply.
To first influence public opinion, back in the 1970s-1990s era, billionaires associated with the GOP built a whole series of institutions whose sole purpose was to influence public opinion in ways that comported with the billionaire’s oligarchic agenda.
They crank out policy papers, write op-eds for newspapers and websites, engage in social media, and provide “expert” guests for TV, radio, NPR, and podcasts. Another major function is to “educate” and lobby Republican elected officials about policy and nominees to executive and judicial positions.
Those include:
— Cato Institute
— Mercatus Center at George Mason University
— Americans for Prosperity
— Heritage Foundation
— Manhattan Institute
— American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
— Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
— DonorsTrust
— Independent Women's Forum (IWF)
— Federalist Society
— Judicial Crisis Network (Now Concord Fund)
— Republican State Leadership Committee
— Alliance Defending Freedom
— Marble Freedom Trust
— 85 Fund (Formerly Judicial Education Project)
They also created the State Policy Network, which funds and guides a network of state-based think tanks in every state in America. They similarly influence political discussion through interactions with the media by publishing papers, participating in social media, and lobbying/educating Republican governors, state representatives, and senators. (At the end of this article is a list of them.)
There is no similar infrastructure on the left because no lefty billionaires ever set out to create one.
There are a few left-leaning think tanks and policy outfits like Public Citizen, NAACP, ACLU, Center for American Progress, Economic Policy Institute, Roosevelt Institute, Demos, and the Century Foundation. None of these, however, have levels of funding, inter-agency coordination, or integration with the Democratic Party that even begins to approximate the list of conservative organizations above.
In addition to creating powerful, well-funded groups to influence public policy, conservatives focused on the media itself, which they had historically seen as their enemy. Early efforts included Lee Atwater’s famous 1980s “work the refs” strategy of complaining loudly whenever media outlets reported on partisan issues that reflected poorly on the GOP and its politicians.
These were followed by funding and rolling out Rush Limbaugh’s show (1988), Reagan fast-tracking the citizenship of Rupert Murdoch and the subsequent start of Fox “News”; Sinclair’s purchase of hundreds of local TV stations; billionaires like the Dickey brothers purchasing hundreds of local radio stations; and Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital purchasing Clear Channel (2008) and then taking progressive Air America programming off their stations (2010).
Multimillionaire televangelists and wealthy rightwing Hispanics got into the game as well over the past two decades, purchasing over a thousand radio stations nationwide.
The result of these collective efforts is around 1500 radio stations programming rightwing talk (and hundreds of young “farm team” rightwing talk show hosts learning the trade in local markets), almost a thousand “nonprofit” religious stations that also push rightwing politics, and several hundred rightwing Spanish-language stations (that had a huge influence on the Latino vote in 2024).
Rightwing media is now a multi-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise that includes three major cable TV networks, and more recently rightwing billionaires have ventured into the newspaper business. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post, Patrick Soon-Shiong picked up the LA Times, Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post and The Wall Street Journal, and New York City-based hedge funds run by rightwing billionaires own around half of all local newspapers in the country.
And now they’re focusing this media behemoth toward their efforts to destroy the Democratic Party in California and neuter Governor Newsom’s hopes to one day become president.
Again, there is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
A major parallel strategy Republicans followed was to use this media monster to take over enough states to take control of the Senate and, even when not in majority control, use the filibuster to block Democratic efforts at reform.
There is no leftwing or Democratic analog to this media empire that’s been created and is held together largely by a handful of conservative billionaires.
Their initial focus was low-population and largely rural states, as radio stations, TV stations, and newspapers in those markets are often very cheap.
By the end of 2010, when Romney/Bain shut down the progressive Air America radio network that had helped get Barack Obama elected in 2008, one could drive from coast-to-coast and continuously hear rightwing talk radio but only rarely (when passing through big cities or on SiriusXM) find a progressive voice.
This silencing of progressive talk radio and absolute dominance of the airwaves, both on radio and TV, made it easy for Republicans over the past 35 years to flip low-population and rural states that had been Democratic for generations into the GOP’s camp.
West Virginia, Arkansas (former governor: Bill Clinton), Kentucky, Louisiana, Alabama, Montana (former governor: Brian Schweitzer), Iowa (former governor: Tom Vilsack), Wyoming (former governor: Mike Sullivan), Tennessee (former senator: Al Gore), Georgia (former governor: Roy Barnes), Missouri, and Texas (former governor: Ann Richards) all went from solid blue or largely blue to solid red, as there have functionally been no dissenting voices heard in local media since the 1980s.
A large handful of other states followed a similar trajectory, giving Republicans majority control of the least democratic of our legislative institutions, the Senate, where Wyoming (pop: 584,000) has the same two senators — and thus the same legislative power — as California (pop: 38.9 million).
Following these victories, Republicans turned their attention to the fastest growing aspects of the Fourth Estate: Social media and podcasts. With help from Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency and Wagner Group trolls, GOP operatives, politicians, talk hosts, podcasters, influencers, and cyberbullies began to saturate social media and podcasts with messages condemning Democrats for every little thing that went wrong in America.
Most recently, they’ve brought control of X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp under their banner, both through allowing the uninhibited spread of political lies and disinformation and by tilting their secret algorithms that control what content people see toward the right.
As a result, Republicans — using their vast think tank and media power — have succeeded in rolling back voting rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and taking an axe to public education. And now they’re using lies and slander to go after Gavin Newsom.
This massive machine was so successful in recasting the public perception of elected Democrats that millions of dispirited formerly-Democratic voters simply gave up and failed to vote in the 2024 election.
Next in their sights — along with more tax cuts for the billionaires who funded all this — are healthcare and Social Security, as they work to roll back the last 100 years and end the New Deal and Great Society.
If Democrats want to slow this speeding train heading toward single-party rule of America, they must get with the program and begin to support existing and build out new and powerful policy think tanks and media operations.
The coming election of a new DNC chair presents an opportunity to begin reforming and redirecting the efforts of the Party to a 50-state strategy that can effectively compete with Republicans.
And billionaires with a social conscience — like MacKenzie Scott, Reid Hoffman, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Tom Steyer — need to consider emulating the efforts of Charles Koch, Miriam Adelson, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, and Ken Griffin.
Republicans have already decided to exploit the climate-change-driven wildfires on the west coast to try to flip California from Blue to Red in the next elections. They’re using their massive media machine to promote naked lies, blaming the fires on Democratic politicians while obscuring the role of the climate change driven by oil industry executives who fund the GOP and many of their think tanks.
Without an all-hands-on-deck effort to build out a Democratic media machine now, our precious democracy may soon be replaced with an authoritarian dystopia that serves nobody but the morbidly rich.
And California could become their biggest victory since the election of Governor Reagan.
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The Energy Gap: Why Democrats Keep Losing to GOP Plutocrats
Energy counts, matters, and wins the political battles. There isn't even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
Nov 29, 2024
Over thirty years ago, Republican historian and political analyst, Kevin Phillips, remarked that the “Republicans go for the jugular while the Democrats go for the capillaries.” This serious disparity in political energy levels is rarely taken into account to explain election turnouts. The voluntary enfeebling of the Democratic Party started long ago. In 1970, writing in Harper’s Magazine, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a co-founder of Americans for Democratic Action, wrote an article “Who Needs Democrats? And What It Takes to be Needed?” He argued that if the Democratic Party does not take on the corporate and political establishment, it has no purpose at all.
In 2001, long after the 1980 Reagan landslide of Jimmy Carter, Labor Secretary under Clinton, Robert Reich, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post which declared, “…The Democratic Party. It’s Dead.”
In the following years, while the Democrats were accelerating their abandonment of half the country as “red states,” and became more out of touch with blue-collar workers and unions, whom they took for granted, the Republicans were becoming more energized by the year. Their mouthpieces dominating talk radio – e.g., Rush Limbaugh – were directly sowing unrebutted discord, day after day, among blue-collar workers against the Democrats. Why? It’s because the Democrats essentially gave up on Talk Radio and didn’t bother listening to how these corporatist radio bloviators were turning hard working listeners into Reagan Democrats.
While the GOP was eroding the core base of the Democratic Party and taking total control of red state legislatures, governorships, and courts, the Democrats, starting in 1979, were plunging into enticing and taking corporate PAC money, as urged by then Rep. Tony Coelho (D-CA). This reliance on corporate campaign money weakened the Party’s positions and actions on behalf of workers, consumers, the environment, and the need for an expanded social safety net for the populace. Western nations have provided their citizens superior health care, family support and education programs for decades.
The comparative energy levels were exhibited in the 2010 state gerrymandering drive. While the Democrats were snoozing, a laser beam effort in several states, like Pennsylvania, took the Dems to the cleaners. The result: majority GOP Congressional delegations for a decade even though the Democrats won the popular vote there. (See: Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley.)
"The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers."
Recall, in 2009 Obama had a large majority Democratic advantage in the House and Senate as a result of his win over John McCain in November 2008. Instead of going forward full throttle with this mandate, Obama chose extreme caution. He focused on Obamacare, after giving up right at the beginning the crucial “public option” allowing people to opt out of the corporate health insurance grip. He gave it up unilaterally before negotiations began with the obstructive GOP.
For the rest of his term, Obama appeared to be resting. He promised a $9.50 federal minimum wage in his 2008 campaign but didn’t lift a finger for it during his first term. It is still at a poverty wage of $7.25 per hour to this day. He didn’t really put up a grassroots fight for his stimulus bill following the Wall Street collapse and the great recession starting under George W. Bush, (the war criminal against the Iraqi people.) Obama even declined to prosecute the Wall Street crooks.
In the meantime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, managed to lose the House to a reactionary GOP in the 2010 elections, the 2012 elections, the 2014 elections and the 2016 elections, straightjacketing any possible Obama agenda in the Congress. The Dems had the popular New Deal agenda update in their grasp, but let it slip through their fingers while the GOP had a corporatist anti-worker, consumer, and women’s agenda and with ferocious energy blocked improvements supported by a majority of people in the US.
Even more inexplicable was the Democratic Party’s refusal to strongly support the galvanizing political civic movement to cancel the Electoral College (see NationalPopularVote.com). This organizing effort has led so far to the passage of state laws (California, New York, Illinois, etc.) handing the Electoral College vote to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The Democrats won the popular vote in 2000 (Al Gore) and 2016 (Hillary Clinton) but lost the Electoral College vote to G.W. Bush and the surprised Donald Trump. Still, the Democrats stay on the sidelines though this movement already has enabled state laws totaling 215 Electoral College votes, needing only to get to 270 to neutralize this anti-democratic vestige from the historic era of slavery.
Almost everywhere you look you see this huge disparity in energy levels. Compare the smaller Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives with the Pelosi-toady Progressive Caucus. The difference is that between thunder and slumber over the years.
Compare the Tea Party’s slamming impact on the established GOP in Congress with the tepid attitude of most labor unions and the AFL-CIO deferring to the Democratic Party.
Compare the over-the-top corporate judges to the so-called liberal judges, as relating to federal cases against Trump.
Compare the comprehensive ghastly Heritage Foundation’s 900-page 2025 blueprint directed toward the GOP expansion of the corporate state and the stripping away of services to the people and their rights with the agenda advanced by the progressive citizen groups. No comparison. The media notices this difference in energy levels which is one reason it gives more coverage to the right-wing messianic bulldozers who show in every way that they are hungrier for taking power as they take no prisoners.
Partisan energy disparities even extend to the right-wing vs. left-wing media. The former has the brazen Fox News network. The left has nothing like that. Bill Moyers told me he urged mega-rich George Soros and allies to start a competing progressive network after Fox became quickly formidable. No way.
The right-wing magazines cover the actions of their right-wing allies, plus those gatherings and books. While the progressive media mostly ignores reviewing progressive books and what citizen groups are driving for against corporate power in Washington, DC, and at the state level. The Progressive media prefers publishing their opinions and exposé pieces. That’s one reason why there are more non-fiction right-wing corporatist books which become best sellers, while progressive tomes gather dust.
Further weakening the energy gap in favor of the GOP are the Democrats who look for scapegoats like the Greens to account for their disgraceful losses. They rarely look at themselves in the mirror. Democrats like Norman Solomon (See, Roots Action) issue “autopsy reports” following Party defeats. The 2017 report documented the Democratic Party’s arrogant, entrenched leadership which ignores the progressive base.
After the November 5th debacle, have you heard about mass resignations by Democrats responsible for this victory by the convicted felon, chronic liar, bigot, corrupt, phony promisor Trump? Well, the DNC chair, Jamie Harrison is resigning but that is pro forma. Other Democratic leaders are still on board at the state and federal level, in addition to, astonishingly enough, the failed corporate political/media consultants who enriched themselves while wasting away the biggest flood of campaign money in American history on the Kamala Harris campaign.
Younger Democrats who raise the need to displace the failed Democratic apparatchiks, and who want popular vigorous progressive agendas, as espoused by the naturally popular Senator Bernie Sanders, get ignored or worse pushed out of contention, visibility and, importantly, respect.
The Party’s losing elders have assured the absence of farm teams, of successors. Speaker Pelosi and her deputy Rep. Steny Hoyer are experts at this geriatric supremacy despite their track record of losing to the aggressive Republican plutocrats. Energy counts, matters and wins the political battles. There isn’t even any adrenaline around the Dems' capillaries.
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US Fascism Has Arrived Thanks to 30 Years of Right-Wing Talk Radio Dominance
The GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable, but Democrats must get into the talk-radio game before ever more damage is done.
Sep 28, 2024
“Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison
After Ronald Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time Rule, Republican money men got the memo. Whichever party controlled the most states would have a big edge in both the Senate (and thus control of the Supreme Court nominations) and the Electoral College, and most of the low- and medium-population states had relatively inexpensive media markets.
You could buy or lease radio stations for less than a party might spend over a four-year electoral cycle on advertising, so why not simply acquire a few hundred stations across a dozen or more states and program them with rightwing talk radio 24/7?
This became particularly easy after Bill Clinton signed the neoliberal Telecommunications Act of 1996 that ended limits on how many radio or TV stations a single corporation or billionaire could own. Within months of that bill passing into law, Clear Channel and other networks had gone from small regional groups to massive nationwide radio empires.The strategy worked, and today there are over 1,500 rightwing radio stations in America, along with another 700 or so religious stations that regularly endorse Republican memes and candidates for office.
I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades. In 1994, when Newt Gingrich took control of the House of Representatives, he understood the power of talk radio.
“For the first 100 days of the congressional session,” writes Randy Bobbit in his book Us Against Them, “talk radio hosts broadcast live from the capitol building…. When the talk radio throng outgrew the working spaces available, Gingrich allowed some hosts to work in the extra space in his office.”
George W. Bush repeatedly invited talk-radio hosts to broadcast from the White House lawn, although Obama cancelled the tradition; Trump then continued the Republican seduction of the media that dated back to the 1990s.
And the GOP hold on most of American radio seems pretty unshakable.
A few years ago, a billionaire acquired one of the largest networks of these stations (800+ stations) and a senator I’ve known for years invited him and me to meet in his office near the US Capitol. The Senator asked the billionaire — who then owned several hundred stations programming exclusively rightwing content — if he’d ever considered putting some progressive content on the air.
Right-wing talk radio has been integral to Republican strategy for decades.
The billionaire leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, tented his fingers in front of his mouth, and then said, carefully but emphatically:
“I’ll never put anybody on my air who wants to raise my taxes.”
A few years earlier, I’d sat at lunch at a Talkers Magazine conference with a vice president of what is arguably the most influential of the rightwing radio station networks; the company had started out as a bible publishing business and moved from there into radio and then into political radio.
I asked him if he’d consider putting a progressive show on any of his stations (they were all 100% conservative talk) and he bluntly told me it was “never going to happen” because, he said, “It’s impossible for a liberal to be a true Christian.”
Along with Fox “News,” rightwing talk radio is the main way Republicans have seized and held control over multiple red states. History shows that putting progressive programming on the air in those states could reverse that trend.
Back in 2008, Air America was broadcasting on 62 radio stations that covered a large part of America, including rural areas that had never before experienced progressive talk radio. Most of the stations were leased from Clear Channel, which also owned and programmed rightwing radio on several hundred of its stations.
I’m not aware of any studies proving or disproving the hypothesis, but I believe a large factor in President Obama’s election in 2008 was Air America promoting his candidacy relentlessly. It certainly didn’t hurt: we reached millions of people every single day during that election.
Liberal talk radio carried important messages that were vital to the rural parts of America. That we are all interdependent; that none of us can entirely stand alone unless we are fabulously rich, which is the sales pitch the billionaires try to sell us with their libertarianism; that without government supports and a social safety net, farming would be so vulnerable and financially dangerous (particularly with our weather emergency) that it wouldn’t be viable.
Think about it — political campaigns will pay thousands for a minute of advertising, and find that to be so effective that they continue to buy ads year after year. If that minute can be so influential, how about a host — who’s built a relationship with his or her listeners — telling them dozens of times a day who they should vote for and why? You literally can’t buy promotion like that; you have to buy the station instead.
I wrote the original business plan for Air America Radio back in December of 2002 with an article I published that month on Common Dreams.
Sheldon and Anita Drobney, two venture capitalists from Chicago, read the article and called me up; the next thing I knew I was in the Midwest helping them and Jon Sinton game out how to bring a progressive network into being. Sheldon wrote about it in his book, The Road to Air America, including reprinting my original article.
Impatient to prove the concept of progressive talk radio could work, I started my own program on a local Vermont station in March, 2003, and then moved it to a radio network in 2004. When Air America came online in 2005, we moved it to that network and picked up SiriusXM.
Then Mitt Romney decided he was going to run for president. No slouch, Mr. Romney: he understood the power of media and so apparently directed his private equity firm, Bain Capital, to purchase the entire portfolio of Clear Channel radio stations in the summer of 2008.
Within two years, heading toward the 2012 election when Romney challenged Obama, most all of their stations had flipped their programming from Air America to sports. It killed Air America, although my show was the lone survivor and is still on SiriusXM, Free Speech TV, and stations across the country.
Around the time Romney was buying Clear Channel, a group of Air America talent and I met in DC with a group of Democratic members of the House and Senate. We suggested they should reach out to big Democratic donors and encourage them to buy stations, so if Clear Channel ever pulled the plug on our leases we’d still be on the air.
We argued that, just as Republicans have discovered, it would be a lot cheaper than spending billions on advertising every two or four years.
Initially, the response was positive until one of the senators, who later ran for president, threw cold water on the idea, arguing that the “free market” should determine things like who owns radio stations, rather than a political party or people aligned with it.
Time has passed and word has spread. Entrepreneurs across America have bought or started radio stations — some normal, some “low-power FM” that works just fine in urban areas — to carry progressive programming. It’s a growing trend, and there are even rumors that George Soros is investing in the business.
I’ll be the opening keynote speaker for the Grassroots Radio Conference this week in New Orleans; progressive radio station owners, operators, programmers, and talent from more than half the American states will be there. This is a big step.
A Pew study found that 16 percent of Americans get their election-year information from talk radio. In rural states, where radio stations are cheap, people are far more likely to drive long distances and listen to local radio than in cities; flipping smaller red states shouldn’t be impossible if progressives could put up a few good stations in each state.
While Democrats spend over a billion dollars on paid advertising every two years, and several billion every four years, Republicans use this model of long-term trusting relationships with radio hosts to get out the vote for the GOP.
They know the truth of the old advertising saying, “Nothing beats word-of-mouth.” And a recent Neilson survey supports that adage when it found that 92 percent of consumers “believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.”
In 2016, right-wing talk radio gave Donald Trump the boost he needed to put him in the White House. The hosts loved him and promoted him relentlessly. The same went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, as talk radio became the primary locus for swift-boating John Kerry.
It works. Every weekday, all across America, people get into their cars and drive to or from work listening to the radio; as the nation’s largest statistics organization, Statista, notes, “During an average week in September 2020, radio reached 90.9 percent of all American men aged between 35 and 64 years of age.”
Radio engages, persuades, and informs — and, when done right, builds trust. And the first rule of politics is that trust wins elections.
In politics, just a few points usually decides winners and losers — and talk radio has reliably delivered that incremental edge to the GOP for three decades.
Democrats must get into the talk-radio game. As the old saying goes, “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
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The Four Horsemen: Rush, Roger, Rupert, and The Donald May Ride Forever
As do pestilence, famine, war, and death.
Mar 08, 2021
The Four Horsemen of our media apocalypse--Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, and Donald Trump--have ridden roughshod over us this past half-century leaving their hoofprints on our politics, our culture, and our lives. Two of them are gone now, but their legacies, including the News Corporation, the Fox News empire, and a gang of broadcast barbarians will ensure that a lasting plague of misinformation, propaganda masquerading as journalism, and plain old fake news will be our inheritance.
The original Four Horsemen were biblical characters seen as punishments from God. By the time they became common literary and then film currency, they generally went by the names of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. Matching each with Limbaugh, Ailes, Murdoch, and Trump should prove a grisly but all-too-relevant parlor game. The originals were supposed to signal end times and sometimes, when I think about their modern American descendants, I wonder if we're heading in just that direction.
Isn't there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it.
Reflecting on the lives of those modern embodiments of (self-) punishment makes me wonder how we ever let them happen. Isn't there any protection against evil of their sort in a democracy, even when you know about it early? Maybe when evil plays so cleverly into fears and resentments or is just so damn entertaining, not enough people can resist it. Hey, I even worked for one of the horsemen. It was my favorite job... until it wasn't.
But first, let me start with Rush Limbaugh. The nation's leading right-wing bullhorn died last month at 70. His vicious wit ("feminazis") and ability to squeeze complex subjects into catchy sound bites ("In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering") stirred and nourished a devoted mass who would become a crucial part of Trump's base. Limbaugh, earning by the end more than $80 million a year, left his heirs a reported $600 million.
Those numbers, I believe, defined him far more than any political stance he took and, at the same time, made him indefensible. He was Pestilence, spreading poison without either genuine ideology or principle of any sort. He was doing shtick, whatever worked for him (and work it certainly did). He was, by nature, a great entertainer. One more thing: don't kid yourself, he was smart.
I realized this in 1995 when Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken, Jr., was approaching Lou Gehrig's record of 2,130 consecutive baseball games. The Yankee star set that record in 1939 when, after 17 big league seasons, he finally took himself out of the lineup because he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, later known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Tongue-in-cheek, in my then-weekly New York Times sports column, I called on Cal to take a day off to avoid breaking the record. I wrote that, if he did, he would "be remembered forever as an athlete who stepped proudly over the statistical rubble of his sport to lead us all into a higher level of consciousness. He will end up a bigger Calvin than Klein."
The response from pundits, sportswriters, and fans was overwhelmingly negative. I was called clueless and stupid or, at least, a running dog of a new, much-mocked and demeaned "participation culture," unaware of the competitive nature of sports. Worse yet, I was trying to deny a hero his due.
It seemed that, of all people, only Limbaugh picked up on the mindless paradox of the situation--after all, Ripken would merely have to show up at work that day to claim his trophy--or even how obviously I had been offering my advice tongue in cheek. And he said so on a national radio network carrying his shows.
As the saying goes, it takes one to know one. That he saw what I was actually doing convinced me that he, too, often had his tongue tucked firmly in that cheek of his and away from anything that might pass for his rational brain. And this would, in the end, make it all that much worse. My guess: he wasn't ever truly a believer in the right-wing trash he talked. From the beginning, he was a mercenary, a commercial provocateur who found fame and fortune by spreading ever more toxic takes.
Down Under with Murdoch
Of the Four Horsemen, I came upon Rupert Murdoch first--in early 1977, soon after he bought that once-liberal newspaper, the New York Post. Among his earliest hires as columnists (strange indeed, given what we now know of him) were progressive icon Murray Kempton and me.
I already knew something about Murdoch's Australian and British reputation as a venal press lord, but the lure of a no-holds-barred cityside column and the possibility of sharing an office with Kempton proved irresistible. Murdoch and I first met in the crowded, raffish Post newsroom in lower Manhattan. He was brisk but pleasant that day, asking me at one point how I would improve the paper. I answered breezily: "For starters, I'd hire more women, Blacks, Latinos, gays, so the city can be properly covered."
He regarded me coolly. "Hmm, yes," he said, "but instead I'm hiring a liberal like you."
At that moment, I sensed that he was a monster and that this would end badly. I lasted all of seven months, mostly thanks to another monster, the serial killer Son of Sam, who terrorized the city that year. Like so many other tabloid writers of that moment, I spent the summer writing about the hunt for him, which mostly kept me out of trouble, since Murdoch loved sex, violence, and crime. But then there were those off-his-message columns I wrote about Israel, the South Bronx, and his favored candidate for mayor, Ed Koch.
And there were my shoes. They were soft Italian suede. Beige. I felt cool in them. One day, a new Australian editor took me aside and said, "Lose the poufter boots, mate. The boss hates them."
Of course, now I had to wear them every day despite that boss's homophobia. It was about then that whole paragraphs simply began to disappear from my column (without anyone consulting me), while the column itself was often shoved ever deeper into the paper, especially if I wrote about, say, marching in a women's movement or gay pride parade with one of my kids. Sometimes the column would be cut entirely.
I resigned from the Post live on Dave Marash's 11 p.m. local CBS TV news show. The next morning, in answer to a question during a press conference in Los Angeles, Murdoch claimed that he had fired me. When that didn't fly, he said that I had never been much good anyway. By then, thanks to TV, more people had heard about me than had ever read anything I wrote at the Times or the Post -- a lesson about the new world we were all being plunged into.
As it happened, there would be no escape from Rupert Murdoch. After quitting the Post, I went back to writing books for HarperCollins, the publishing house that he had bought. Thank goodness he never seemed to make the connection. Not so far anyway.
Soulmates Without a Soul in Sight
Among the Four Horsemen, Murdoch is surely Famine. Given the sports and gossip-driven sensibility of his newspapers and the role of Fox News as a tool of right-wing and Trumpian political propaganda, he's helped starve people on at least three continents of the kinds of information they would need to truly grasp our world and make educated decisions about it.
His most reliable collaborator in those years was Roger Ailes, who became the chairman and CEO of Fox News. He would prove so skilled when it came to purveying misinformation that he deserves a horse of his own. And no question about it, Ailes represented War, both against the truth and (within journalism) for circulation, eyeballs, and the clicks that always favor profit over facts.
Given the sports and gossip-driven sensibility of his newspapers and the role of Fox News as a tool of right-wing and Trumpian political propaganda, he's helped starve people on at least three continents of the kinds of information they would need to truly grasp our world and make educated decisions about it.
Of all four horsemen, I had the least personal interaction with him. One evening in 1990 (I think), I went to see him at his poorly lit midtown office. It was evening and I had the feeling he might have been drinking, though he didn't offer me anything. I was then the host of a nightly local public television show and we wanted to put him on a political panel we were forming. By then, after all, he had successfully advised presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush (though he wouldn't join Murdoch for another six years). He had blown off all the producers who tried to book him on their shows but had agreed to let me come in for a pitch.
I didn't know it, but around then he first met his future co-horseman Rush Limbaugh who, at the time, was still trying to invent himself as a radio star. Limbaugh had walked into New York's posh 21 Club looking for famous people to buttonhole. He soon spotted Ailes but was too intimidated to introduce himself.
As Rush would later tell it, Roger was the one who first swaggered up to him and boomed, "My wife loves you!" Soon after, they began talking and, so Rush reported, he felt that he had met his "soulmate." Ailes would soon be producing a short-lived Limbaugh TV show. Alas, it would prove long-lived indeed by becoming a model for the bogus news/talk format of Fox News a few years later when Murdoch hired Ailes as the devil's consigliere. Later, Ailes would use that very position to advise George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
Still, when I met Ailes that was the unknowable future. It comes back to me now as if in a dream, brief and weird. He listened to my description of my show, "The Eleventh Hour," and why we wanted him as a guest. I may not have been as fawning as I remember myself being. (I hope not anyway.) He nodded along as I made my pitch, offered me the most perfunctory thanks for coming, and dismissed me with body language suggesting that he had checked me out and found nothing he wanted. He simply turned away and began murmuring to a woman I could barely see in the darkened office.
In 2016, after years of commercial and political success together, Murdoch dumped Ailes in the midst of an ever-spreading sex scandal. He had not only personally harassed Fox employees but had created a company-wide climate of abuse and intimidation. He left with a reported $65 million. A year later, he died in Palm Beach (as would Limbaugh four years after that). He was 77.
A "Great Show" for a Great Showman
Of all the horsemen in those years, I spent the most time with Donald Trump. (By now, haven't we all?) He's our greatest shame because while we in the media may have thought that we were using him--listening sneeringly to his lies and braggadocio since it pushed our media products so effectively--he was using us bigly. Making the "fake news media" his very own accomplices may have been his greatest skill.
I was no exception to the media patsies who flocked to him for easy stories. Maybe I didn't take him seriously enough then because we both came from Queens, a scorned outer borough of New York City, or because he was already a well-known publicity hound and boldfaced tabloid name.
Honestly, who could have taken an obvious buffoon like him seriously? And back then, we didn't have to, as long as we took him. And here's what I do remember from those days: he would always respond to a question, no matter how negative, as long as he was its subject. That's all he truly cared about. Him, him, him, and him again.
The first time we met, in the early 1980s--he was then an ambitious real-estate mogul and B-list celebrity--he insisted that he didn't much like attention, but felt obligated to do the interview because I represented "a great show" ("CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt"). He would then go on to lie about his scheme to pressure the National Football League into admitting to its ranks the New Jersey Generals, the United States Football League team he then owned.
In a later meeting, I remember him offering me his supposed credo as a public figure, one that in retrospect seems grimly ironic, if not satiric: "I tend to think that you should be decent, you should be fair, you should be straight, and you should do the best you can. And beyond that, you can't do very much really. So yeah, you do have a responsibility." Then, as if adding a note in the margins of his bland comment, he added, tellingly enough, "I'm not sure to what extent that responsibility holds."
Once, for reasons I can't recall, I returned to that supposed sense of "responsibility" of his, asking him if he'd like to "run the country as you have run your organization." That was in 1984 (no symbolism intended) and he responded, "I would much prefer that somebody else do it. I just don't know if the somebody else is there." So, 32 years before his election, he was, it seems, already imagining the unimaginable that would become our very own surreal world in 2016. "This country," he added ominously, "needs major surgery."
"Are you the surgeon?" I asked, innocently enough.
"I think I'd do a fantastic job, but I really would prefer not doing it."
I would have preferred that, too, but it's much too late now and, sadly enough, there's no reason to think that the ride of the modern Four Horsemen is over. Limbaugh and Aisles have left their vast poisonous pools behind and they won't dry up soon. Murdoch, turning 90 just days from now, is still running his empire. And Donald Trump, of course, continues to gallop toward the future astride his pale horse, as the rider called Death.
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Rush Limbaugh Was Vital to the Conservative Movement--and Paved the Road for Trump
Limbaugh's show taught disparate parts of the right that they should be one big happy family.
Feb 23, 2021
Rush Limbaugh died on February 17, leaving behind a legacy of lies, bigotry, science denial and conspiracy mongering--as well as a media and political system significantly transformed by his influence.
Limbaugh was a talented broadcaster who forged an intimate connection with his audience. Since he launched his nationally syndicated radio show in 1988, his success has helped to inspire an army of lesser talk radio clones, fueled an explosive growth in right-wing media generally, and introduced a new era of conservative commentary and politics steeped in aggrieved resentment and a willful disregard for facts.
Limbaugh's influence can be seen in everything from 1994's "Gingrich Revolution" to the Bush administration's baiting of "reality-based communities" to the Tea Party movement to the January 6 storming of the Capitol. It is no exaggeration to say that the Donald Trump movement is in many ways the culmination of the project Rush Limbaugh has been working on for more than three decades.
By the time FAIR published its pioneering 1994 report on Limbaugh, "The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh vs. Reality" (Extra!, 7-8/94), his show was already the biggest thing in talk radio, Ronald Reagan had dubbed him the leader of the conservative movement, and George H.W. Bush had carried Limbaugh's luggage to the White House Lincoln Bedroom. GOP leaders would soon credit the talk radio host with helping flip the House in their favor in the 1994 elections.
Our report provided dozens of examples of Limbaugh's penchant for falsehoods, like his claims that bra size is inversely correlated with women's IQs, that there is "no conclusive proof" nicotine is addictive and that "the poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe."
But despite his power and connections, the fact that Limbaugh was a serial dissembler seemed to come as a surprise to establishment media, who treated the report like a breaking story. A clipping service FAIR hired for the occasion found more 1,200 outlets had published an Associated Press story (6/29/94) on our report, while dozens more stories ran from other wire services and newspapers. Why had Limbaugh escaped serious scrutiny for so long?
One explanation is that many of these outlets were complicit in Limbaugh's rise. As we wrote at the time (Extra!, 7-8/94):
Limbaugh's chronic inaccuracy, and his lack of accountability, wouldn't be such a problem if Limbaugh were just a cranky entertainer, like Howard Stern. But Limbaugh is taken seriously by "serious" media--in addition to Nightline, he's been an "expert" on such chat shows as Charlie Roseand Meet the Press. The New York Times (10/15/92) and Newsweek(1/24/94) have published his writings. A US News & World Reportpiece (8/16/93) by Steven Roberts declared, "The information Mr. Limbaugh provides is generally accurate."
A year later, FAIR expanded the report into a book, The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, listing even more Limbaugh falsehoods, and much more on his racism and bigotry towards women, LGBTQ people, the poor, the homeless and people living with HIV.
For many, FAIR's report and book marked Limbaugh for the first time as a mendacious bigot. David Letterman dubbed him "The Lyin' King," House Speaker Gingrich stopped appearing regularly on his show, and media invites became less frequent. When Limbaugh was being considered for a job as a color commentator on ABC's Monday Night Football program, an LA Times op-ed (6/7/00) by myself and FAIR founder Jeff Cohen reportedly played a role in ABC ultimately denying Limbaugh the job.
Leave Rush alone!
Based on my long years of listening to talk radio, Limbaugh's mastery of the medium owed much to his obvious talents--his voice and his usually light entertaining manner--and to the intimacy of a medium in which listeners, typically alone when they tune in, develop a deep if one-sided personal connection to the hosts.
And here was where Limbaugh set himself apart from other talkers. As he projected a view of himself as a victim, he also nurtured the same aggrieved sensibility in his listeners. If you listened for any amount of time, the "Rush and me against the world" vibe came through in both host and callers.
One early example of this was Rush's false claim (Extra!, 11-12/94) that critics were campaigning to silence him through reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, which he referred to as a "Hush Rush" bill. In reality, the doctrine was never a threat to talk radio hosts, who by virtue of taking calls from listeners with various perspectives were seen as naturally complying with the FCC rule. (The rule was widely misunderstood as requiring "equal time," which it never mandated--Extra!, 1-2/05.) Over its entire history, not one FCC judgment involving the Fairness Doctrine ever concerned itself with talk radio, which flourished locally under the doctrine for decades before its 1987 scrapping.
If Limbaugh lost some mainstream cachet because of our criticism, by the early '00s he had served a vital purpose. The right had built up its own outlets, so conservatives didn't need the validation of the establishment to thrive. The conservative media establishment that the right dreamed of since the days of Richard Nixon (Extra!, 3-4/95) and the Powell Memo had been realized. The year after our LA Times op-ed, Fox took over first place in cable news, and has remained there ever since. The new conservative media firmament adopted the language of grievance and resentment from the man who showed how to use establishment scorn as a recruiting tool better than anyone until Donald Trump.
It may be too simple to say that without Limbaugh, there would be no Trump, but before Limbaugh there wasn't really a conservative movement; there was an alliance of convenience between the religious right and pro-business conservatives, who disagreed on several issues (FAIR.org, 3/6/18). Limbaugh's show taught these disparate parts of the right that they should be one big happy family. Trump took Limbaugh's lessons to heart, and to the White House; that may be Limbaugh's most lasting legacy.
Sidebar:
Why Talk Radio Blew Up
Talk radio not only thrived for decades under the Fairness Doctrine, it was rapidly growing in the decade before the doctrine was scrapped. A variety of factors unrelated to the doctrine contributed to the growth of talk radio in general, and conservative talk in particular. As musical programming fled to higher-fidelity FM signals, AM programmers were left with empty schedules to fill. At the same time, improvements in satellite technology and cheaper 800-number telephone lines were making national call-in shows more feasible ("Talk Show Culture," EllenHume.com; Extra!, 1-2/07).
This confluence of factors created opportunities, and conservative talk radio, which was already going strong locally across the country, took advantage of them. Limbaugh, who'd been getting good ratings on Sacramento's KFBK, was just one of many conservative talk hosts who benefited; in 1988, he moved to New York to launch the syndicated show on WABCthat brought him to national attention.
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Rush Limbaugh--Prized Propagandist of America's Reactionary Right-Wing--Dead at 70
"If you don't want people to speak ill of you when you die, then live decently," said one critic.
Feb 16, 2021
Longtime radio host, right-wing zealot, and enemy of the common good Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday after a battle with cancer. He was 70 years old.
"If you don't want people to speak ill of you when you die, then live decently," said writer and political observer Anand Giridharadas in response to the news that the "Bigoted King of Talk Radio" was dead.
'Both Disgusting and Pure Right-Wing Genius': Trump Awards Bigoted Radio Host Rush Limbaugh Medal of Freedom
"You gotta hand it to Trump. He knows how to keep the base onboard."
Feb 04, 2020
Progressives were quick to pounce after President Donald Trump on Tuesday night awarded radio host Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the middle of the State of the Union, pointing out the right-wing provocateur's long history of bigotry and hate speech and his contribution to poisoning the American political conversation.
"Few people have done more to degrade our political discourse than Rush Limbaugh," tweeted Matt Duss, foreign policy advisor to the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). "It's an absolute disgrace that he's being honored here."
Limbaugh announced on his syndicated, widely popular radio show Monday that he has advanced, stage four lung cancer and is undergoing treatment. Trump's decision to award Limbaugh the medal was reported earlier Tuesday but the radio host still pretended to be surprised.
First Lady Melania Trump hung the medal on Limbaugh's neck to applause from the GOP side of the chamber.
Intercept journalist Mehdi Hasan called the move a diabolical performance by the president.
"You gotta hand it to Trump. He knows how to keep the base onboard," tweeted Hasan. "Having Melania present Rush Limbaugh with a Presidential Medal of Freedom (!) in the midst of #SOTU is both disgusting and pure right-wing genius."
Reaction from the left to the spectacle was a mixture of shock, outrage, and disgust.
" Donald Trump is honoring Rush Limbaugh with the highest civilian honor America can bestow, specifically because Limbaugh spent decades calling feminists 'Nazis' and liberals 'traitors,' so that when real Nazis and traitors appeared, they were well-camouflaged," writer A.R. Moxon said on Twitter.
CNN reporter Jim Acosta noted Limbaugh's long history of racism and hate speech after the president's address, pointing out that any electoral benefit the president may have hoped to gain from appealing to black Americans was likely undercut by the award.
"He was trying to make appeals to the African-American community," said Acosta. "It can't be forgotten he was awarding the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, who has a history of making derogatory comments about African-Americans. So I think, you know, overall it's a wash."
Derogatory comments is putting it mildly. Limbaugh once told a black caller upset over his rhetoric to call back into the show after she took the "bone" out of her nose. He defended slavery on numerous occasions and made multiple racist comments about black athletes on his show.
As Media Matters explained as part of an exhaustive rundown of Limbaugh's bigoted, hateful comments Tuesday night:
Limbaugh also referred to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as a "Hafrican American," and played a mocking song called "Barack the Magic Negro." Barely nine months in the Obama presidency, Limbaugh declared, "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering." In 2011, he accused then-first lady Michelle Obama of "uppity-ism," and he also promoted a conspiracy theory that "race riots are part of the plan that this regime has."
With a 32-year-career in hate radio, Limbaugh has made many other comments that are offensive, poisonous, and aimed at stoking white rage.
They include:
- Calling then-12-year-old Chelsea Clinton a "dog";
- Repeatedly analogizing gay marriage to bestiality;
- Launching a series of sexist attacks on then-law student Sandra Fluke in 2012;
- Referring to poor children as "wanton waifs";
- Spreading rumors that The Hill journalist Krystal Ball posed nude at 14 years old; and
- Accusing actor Michael J. Fox of faking Parkinson's
Limbaugh also, according to Tuesday's Media Matters report, spread conspiracy theories aimed at discouraging right-wing accountability to his audience:
Indeed, there were many other conspiracy theories that Limbaugh has promoted in his career, including one about the death of Clinton White House aide Vince Foster. He also claimed that Obama might cancel the 2012 elections or that Obama was both an "African Colonial" or an anti-colonialist (both of which were bad). In 2018, he suggested that mass shootings in New Zealand might have been a false flag attack to smear conservatives. (On that subject, he also alleged, "The people that are shooting up schools more than likely vote Democrat when you get right down to it, if they vote.") He also suggested that Al Qaeda may have given up Osama Bin Laden "for the express purpose of making Obama look good."
A truly exhaustive accounting of Limbaugh's bigotry is beyond the scope of this news article.
Those who have followed his career, however, found the award to be an outrage.
"Rush Limbaugh has done nothing but spread hate," said immigration lawyer Mana Yegani.
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Citing Climate Hoax, Limbaugh Downplayed Irma Threat to Millions. Now He's Evacuating
Radio host tells listeners hurricane warnings are exaggerated, but now indicates he's getting out of town before massive storm hits
Sep 08, 2017
On Tuesday, right-wing radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh claimed the media was intentionally exaggerating threats about Hurricane Irma to advance a "climate change agenda" and enable local businesses to make money off of emergency preparation efforts. On Thursday, Limbaugh indicated he will evacuate South Florida ahead of the storm.
"May as well go ahead and announce this," he said during his Thursday show. "I'm not going to get into details because of the security nature of things, but it turns out that we will not be able to do the program here tomorrow.... We'll be on the air next week, folks, from parts unknown. So we'll be back on Monday. It's just that tomorrow is going to be problematic. Tomorrow it would be, I think, legally impossible for us to originate the program out of here."
Many have
Omg.%20"Legally%20impossible"%20=%20mandatory%20evacuation.%20This%20is%20too%20rich.%20Real%20deniers%20don't%20listen%20to%20evacuation%20orders.%20Fight%20the%20power,%20Rush.%20https://t.co/0NAqMHxxDG
--%20Juliette%20Kayyem%20(@juliettekayyem)%20September%208,%202017%20Keep ReadingShow Less
As Planet Rages With Fires and Storms, Ire Aimed at Murderous Climate Denialism
"It is past time to call out Trump and all climate deniers for this crime against humanity. No more treating climate denial like an honest difference of opinion."
Sep 07, 2017
As Houston begins its long recovery from Hurricane Harvey, epic wildfires burn throughout the western U.S., and Irma charges toward Florida after devastating several Caribbean islands, while two other storms build strength in the Atlantic basin, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is among those helping to expose the deadly consequences of climate change denialism by claiming threats posed by such global warming-related events are being exaggerated.
"One thing that the science is very clear on is that the strongest storms will get stronger because of global warming, because the oceans are warmer."
-- Michael Mann, climate scientist
And so while climate activist Bill McKibben on Thursday morning warned that "we've never had anything quite like" the current fires and storms now being experienced, it was The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard who argues, in a piece titled "Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us," that those who have made it public policy to downplay the threat of man-made climate change should be held to account for the deaths that such denialism is now causing.
During his show on Tuesday, Limbaugh told his listeners: "There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it.... All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and dangerous, and it's mission accomplished, agenda advanced."
He also alleged that reporting about hurricanes results from a "symbiotic relationship between retailers and local media" that "revolves around money," adding: "The media benefits with the panic with increased eyeballs, and the retailers benefit from the panic with increased sales, and the TV companies benefit because they're getting advertising dollars from the businesses that are seeing all this attention from customers."
But these comments--which arrived as people in the Caribbean made emergency preparations for landfall and officials in Florida began announcing mandatory evacuations--were immediately decried as irresponsible.
"To state the obvious, these are potentially dangerous comments from Limbaugh, who is based in Palm Beach, Fla.," writes Callum Borchers for the Washington Post. "He is encouraging listeners who might be in Irma's path not to take seriously the official guidance disseminated through the media."
With evacuations underway in southeast Florida on Thursday morning, the U.S. National Hurricane Service warned that Irma will likely "maintain most of its current intensity" while it approaches the state, and "the threat of dangerous major hurricane impacts in Florida continues to increase."
"Hurricane Irma's epic size is being fueled by global warming," Michael Le Page wrote for New Scientist on Wednesday. "Hurricane Irma has the strongest winds of any hurricane to form in the open Atlantic, with sustained wind speeds of 295 kph," and "Irma could yet grow stronger."
"So why did Irma grow so strong? Most likely because climate change is making Atlantic waters ever warmer," Le Page continued. "Tropical cyclones are fueled by warm surface waters."
Climate scientists such as Michael Mann explain that "one thing that the science is very clear on is that the strongest storms will get stronger because of global warming, because the oceans are warmer."
In an interview with The Real News Network on Thursday, Mann said although there are many factors that contribute to how frequently tropical storms occur, with rising ocean temperatures, "we're going to see more of these cat 4, cat 5 monsters like Irma," as well as more extreme weather overall.
"Even though we're so focused here in the U.S. on the impacts of extreme weather events on us," Mann also noted, "in other regions, like India and Bangladesh, and Bangladesh in particular--which is already suffering from the impacts of global sea level rise--a very low-lying region, with millions of people, that has already been impacted by global sea level rise, and now you add to that these flooding record monsoonal rains, and you're talking about a far greater loss of life than we've seen here in the U.S."
"The impacts of climate change are gonna be most felt by the most vulnerable," Mann added, "and that means that there's a real sort of ethical dimension to acting to avert a climate catastrophe."
Watch:
"What makes this so infuriating is that it shouldn't be happening. Experts have warned for decades that global warming would increase these sorts of weather extremes, and that people would suffer and die if protective measures were not implemented," Hertsgaard writes for The Nation. "This is not to say that global warming 'caused' Harvey--a scientifically illiterate framing of the issue--but it did make the rains bigger, more intense, and more destructive."
"Experts have warned for decades that global warming would increase these sorts of weather extremes, and that people would suffer and die if protective measures were not implemented."
--Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation
Last month, Harvey broke the record for the most rainfall from any single storm in the continental U.S., and Irma is now the most powerful Atlantic Ocean hurricane ever recorded. With scientists increasingly alarmed by this apparent new normal, many worry about climate change denialism among those with even more influence than talk radio provocateurs.
As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a Facebook post Thursday morning: "We have a President, an EPA Chief, and a major political party who refuse to acknowledge the threat of climate change, even as we see storms this year reaching unprecedented levels of destruction. The debate is over. Climate change is real, it is here, and it is already doing irreparable damage to our homes and communities."
But as hurricanes, intensified by global warming, continue to wreak havoc on islands and coastal communities--including the now-devastated Caribbean islands whose leaders decried President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and have recently urged developed nations to take action--the Trump administration continues its push for deregulation that benefits fossil fuel companies, and key leaders and advisors within the administration refuse to acknowledge ties between extreme weather events and climate change.
"It is past time to call out Trump and all climate deniers for this crime against humanity. No more treating climate denial like an honest difference of opinion," Hertsgaard writes. "The individuals and institutions pushing climate denial must be called out with even greater vigor: in newspaper columns, on TV and radio talk shows, in town halls, at the ballot box, and by consumer boycotts, legal investigations, shareholder resolutions, street protests, and more."
"Knowing what we know in 2017," Hertsgaard concludes, "expanding fossil-fuel production is like Big Tobacco continuing to addict people to its cancer sticks: technically legal but, in effect, premeditated murder."
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The Essential Pundit Take: 'Trump Became President' by Bombing Syria
"I think Donald Trump became president of the United States" last night, CNN host Fareed Zakaria said when asked about the significance of Trump's airstrikes on Syria (New Day, 4/7/17). "I think this was actually a big moment."
His explanation is worth quoting at length for its distillation of the classic pundit attitude toward presidential violence:
Apr 08, 2017
"I think Donald Trump became president of the United States" last night, CNN host Fareed Zakaria said when asked about the significance of Trump's airstrikes on Syria (New Day, 4/7/17). "I think this was actually a big moment."
His explanation is worth quoting at length for its distillation of the classic pundit attitude toward presidential violence:
Because candidate Trump had said that he would never get involved in the Syrian civil war. He told President Obama, you cannot do this without the authorization of Congress. He seemed unconcerned with global norms.
President Trump recognized that the president of the United States does have to act to enforce international norms, does have to have this broader moral and political purpose. President Trump realized, as every president has for many decades now, that presidents always believe they have inherent legal authority as commander in chief. And they don't need to go to a pesky Congress every time they want military force.
It's entirely true that candidate Trump felt differently. Candidate Obama felt differently than President Obama on these issues.
So I think that what is interesting is even the way in which he justified his actions, President Trump did-for the first time, really, as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America's role in enforcing justice in the world. It was the kind of rhetoric that we have come to expect from American presidents since Harry Truman, but it was the kind of rhetoric that President Trump had pointedly never used, either on the campaign trail nor in his inaugural.
So I think there has been an interesting morphing and a kind of education of Donald Trump.
Note the assurance with which Zakaria insists that a military attack on a sovereign state, unauthorized by the United Nations and unjustifiable in terms of self-defense, signifies a new respect on Trump's part for "global norms" and "international rules." Clearly, for Zakaria as for most pundits, the norm is that international law does not apply to the president of the United States-a doctrine that is usually referred to by the euphemism "American exceptionalism."
Note, too, the contempt with which Zakaria dismisses the idea that a "pesky Congress" should constrain a president's ability to make war; who needs a constitutionally mandated declaration of war when you've got a "broader moral and political purpose"?
Zakaria's remarks recalled the comment by CNN's Van Jones (2/28/17) after Trump celebrated the widow of a Navy SEAL who died in a botched raid in Yemen that killed nine children: Trump "did something tonight that you cannot take away from him. He became president of the United States." They also recall the prediction made by Alex Pareene (The Concourse, 3/1/17) after the pundit reaction to that speech:
Now that Trump has learned that there is a direct relationship between a president's body count and how "presidential" the mainstream political press considers him to be, the whole world is fucked.
But Zakaria also evoked a voice from an earlier generation of war punditry, the New York Times' R.W. Apple (12/21/89), who said after the elder President George Bush invaded Panama that Bush had completed
a presidential initiation rite [joining] American leaders who since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest.... Panama has shown him as a man capable of bold action.
Apple (8/12/90) later praised Bush as "tough," "determined" and "statesmanlike" after Bush warned following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that "American soldiers and American hostages may have to die." "In forceful terms, Mr. Bush sought to prepare the whole American nation for the prospect of bloodshed," was how Apple put it.
Zakaria was not the only talking head striking nostalgic notes as he commented on the US's latest violence. Brian Williams, reporting the breaking news on MSNBC (4/6/17), rhapsodized about the beauty of the Tomahawk missile:
We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean. I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: "I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons." And they are beautiful pictures, of fearsome armaments making what is, for them, a brief flight over this airfield.
Williams' enthusiasm recalled the weapons fetishism of the 1991 Gulf War, which featured CNN (1/16/91) describing the "sweet beautiful sight" of bombers taking off from Saudi Arabia, and CBS correspondent Jim Stewart (1/17/91) raving about "two days of almost picture-perfect assaults."
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