Justin Ling in his podcast on CBC, The Flamethrowers, pointed out that many pundits wondered how Donald Trump got elected and how he led the country to a riot on Capitol Hill? Hillary Clinton wrote a book called What Happened?
Ling reached this conclusion:
“What happened? Well Right-wing radio happened. I know it sounds a bit quaint to talk about the power of radio in 2021. By now most of us have a multi-media broadcast platform sitting in our pockets. But there is something special about the direct intimate connection between the human voice over the airwaves. At its most effective, it is an arrow straight to listeners hearts. For nearly a 100 years, broadcasters have harnessed that power to keep politics in America at a steady boil. Before there was Fox News, before there was The Drudge Report, there was decades of rage and loathing blasting out of 50,000 watt flame thrower towers. All that heat would radically transform the character of radical right-wing politics in America. By the time Donald Trump was elected president, American conservatism was barely recognizable from even a decade prior. This was politics as blood sport. For broadcasters like Michael Savage, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh ideas were almost beside the point. And when you are in a war for hearts and minds and when winning is the only thing that matters, truth is the first casualty of the conflict.”
Ling is right. Right-wing radio was immensely important. But so was right-wing television. So was the Christian nationalist movement. So was the long history of credulity in the US going back to the Puritans that created a country filled with people who want nothing more than to be true believers. There are many forces that brought about the election of Donald Trump and the attempted insurrection he led. All of these currents met and flowed into each other to create this monstrous murky river of democratic decay, resentment, hate, racism, extremism and tortured reality.
Charlie Sykes, the Wisconsin broadcaster who stepped down from Right-wing radio after Trump arrived and he realized he had played a shameful role in fracturing American politics and that there was no place for him any longer, and his kind in this new conservative movement. He said,
“I was a part of this media ecosystem that contributed to the alternative reality media that we created. That we had succeeded in delegitimizing the mainstream media…There came a point we realized we had delegitimized all news.”
Justin Ling described it this way:
“Instead of just being the other side of the story we had created this hermetically sealed bubble, echo chamber, whatever term you want to use that became impenetrable.’
Now of course, as Ling pointed out, nothing was never hermetically sealed. He said,
“Some nasty stuff was leaking in and festering. Whatever right-wing radicalism takes, American talk radio played a central role in shaping the modern movement. And everywhere that the right-wing movement succeeded, it did so by following the talk radio playbook. And even as technology changes the simple power of radio is connecting with huge audiences …It comes by fibre optic cable now, but all the voices are there: a voice in the darkness, striking the matches, and stoking the fire. ”
What else can you say when Alex Jones, so admired a president of the United States, and millions of listeners, says, “This is what we are dealing with ladies and gentlemen, a Secretary of State having sex in a giant vat of feces?” Or other radios hosts say things like this: “That is what black fathers do, they simply leave?” Or “We are living in a Zionist matrix in this country.” Or “We have defacto vaccination quarantine camps already.” Or “What we need in this country is a good old fashioned American revolution.” Yeah, what else can you say?
Sadly, Clarence E. Manion got it absolutely right when as an early right-wing extremist he bellowed over the air waves, “This is not a political war, this is not an economic war, this is not even a military war, this is a religious war at bottom.” That is what is was. And that is what it is. This new crusade is not over yet. Not by a long-shot.
After talk radio, right-wing television helped, to bring in a religious war to America.