Talk radio was the Breitbart.com, the Tea Party, the Trump Train before any of that existed. That's why I focused on it for many years, including hosting a radio program dedicated to exposing the kind of reality-reversing lies, conspiracy theory and white supremacist polemic that is now set to reach the White House.
Stephen Bannon and his running of the Breitbart fake news hatesite appeared on my radar while researching the background of Ben Shapiro, then a Breitbart mainstay, after he had a guest spot on a national talk radio program. That's when I started the Wikipedia Bannon page three years ago.
It had slipped from my mind until a few days after the 2016 election, when I started getting email notifications that the Wiki page was undergoing a flurry of link activity after Bannon was named Trump’s chief advisor, his Karl Rove, his John Podesta.
About the time I created the page, it was becoming obvious that Internet sites like Breitbart were vying with talk radio in terms of effective hate-propaganda and fake news, though I think talk radio is still a major factor and arguably still the dominant one. It’s like the gateway drug. People regularly become exposed to and hooked on it when stuck in their daily commute; afterwards they seek out Breitbart and the other right wing fake news media. (Ur-nationalist and arch-misogynist Rush Limbaugh is still beamed at the captive audience of Armed Forces radio, paid by tax dollars.)
But hatesites had become ubiquitous and that's why I wanted to put that Internet enabler of white nationalism, Bannon, on the map.
Now Bannon is the president-elect's right hand man and the election of 2016 will surely go down in history as the fascist moment coming to America. Some observations and borrowed views:
Decades of the "conservative entertainment complex" of talk radio, FOX News, Alex Jones broadcasts (Trump has been a guest on his show) and now Breitbart-type fake news has changed neural programming, changed people's relationship to basic reality. While the "There are no such things as facts anymore" mindset is now official policy via Trump's barrage of flat-earth-type statements and via conspiracy-theorists like Bannon, Ben Carson and Lt. General Mike Flynn's installment in the Trump team, the United States has been in training for that mindset for years.
The conservative media complex also did decades of groundwork for the white supremacist normalizing also represented by Bannon, Flynn, and Trump's Birther and Central Park Five past. When you understand that statements like "hatred of white people has now become an epidemic in this country" have been pounded into the brains of Americans daily across the United States via talk radio for years, the election of Trump comes as no surprise.
People are sick of reality anyway.
Yes, many people voted for Trump not because of racist, misogynist or reactionary sentiments, but because decades of uninterrupted Reaganomics and corporate greed has left much of America hopeless; that's part of the reality they're sick of. But it doesn't really matter in terms of the fascist moment, except as prelude.
Or maybe it's always been a divided country anyway, and it's all just coming to a head again. The "Pilgrims"--a collection of religious extremists versus their indentured servants. Cowboys versus "Indians". Owners and slaves. The Civil War, a fight over white supremacy that continued in the postwar white supremacist terrorism against people of color and in the Jim Crow laws clear through to the 1960s and the voter suppression that continues to this day. Sounds historically divided to me.
Has anyone noticed that the "alt right" (right wing PC for white supremacists/neo-Nazis) and fake news backgrounds of the Trump team still at least remain issues (the Pope recently compared fake news to eating feces; Flynn’s son has been fired from the Trump team after fake news conspiracy tweets related to a gunman storming into a New York pizzeria), but Trump’s history as a bragging sex offender has now been totally accepted and no longer merits a mention across the great swathe of media? That says a lot about America’s attitude concerning 51% of the country.
I live in Europe now. Russia's Vladimir Putin is a fascist attempting to despoil democracy in Europe, supporting far-right parties and neo-Nazi groups here, while dismantling all vestiges of civil society in Russia and using homophobic laws as a political tool, not to mention deploying neo-Nazi skinheads as his brown shirts in the slow pogrom he has normalized. Don’t get me started on RT. Trump, an apologist for Putin who was apparently even helped in the election by Russian interference, with a team deeply invested in Putin's kleptocracy, is heading to the White House.
America's been lucky not to have reached this moment before. It's here now. As the Chinese/Chamberlain curse says, "May you live in interesting times."