Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America

by John P. Avlon

  She posted a conspiracy-theory video that attempted to prove that Obama believes he can only “ensure his own salvation” and “fate” if he helps African-Americans rise above whites, complete with Barnumesque captions (“LISTEN AS HE ATTACKS WHITE PEOPLE”).

  After Obama’s overly cautious take on the Honduran “coup” crisis infuriated Shay, she posted: “This is an outrage and I CAN NOT believe this nation has him as our leader! It makes me sick!” She posted a few minutes later: “My disdain for Obama is directly proportionate for his disdain of this country.”

  A Facebook friend of Shay’s weighed in: “Here’s what I am getting tired of: If you call Obama a socialist, terrorist, anti-American, whatever, then you’re kinda calling me that, too, cause I voted for him and support him (for the most part). Or, you can claim that I didn’t really know what I voted for, and in doing so you’re kinda saying I’m ignorant and questioning my intelligence.”

  Three minutes later, Shay replied: “I think that you are ignorant if you believe this man is anything but anti american. He freely rights [sic] about Marxist philosophies. I never called him a terrorist, but if his policies are socialist (which they are) then what would you call him? His actions speak very loudly and his actions are very anti american. You just can not get past it. You might not like it but the truth is what it is.”

  With all this ugly information on the table, some thought and hoped that Shay’s campaign might collapse under the weight of the Facebook scandal. “I saw something that was morally wrong, and as a conservative I took it upon myself as an individual to stand up, and I do not regret it at all,” Cassie Wallender, the Washington State YR national committeewoman, wrote in a letter to the committee. “I was attacked for wanting better for Young Republicans—in my lifetime of work for the Republican Party I have never been accused of being a ‘RINO,’ until now, by Audra’s supporters.”

  But Kentucky delegate Katherine Miller reflected the myopia of movement politics when she told the Indianapolis Star, “This controversy really is not the decisive factor for the majority of people voting here. . . . It really has been played up a little bigger than it really is.”46

  The eventual vote took eight hours, with parliamentary fights to hold a voice vote instead of a secret ballot (it turns out that some conservatives do like card check, if it benefits them). Fistfights nearly broke out between the two camps, and a Hoff supporter from the Oklahoma delegation, who was handing out fliers protesting Shay’s Facebook comments, had to be physically removed. “I believe that people were intimidated,” said North Carolina delegate John Ross. “Without a secret ballot, many people did not have the opportunity to vote their conscience.” In the end, Audra Shay got her prize in a vote of 470 to 415.

  “They just took a vote that may have set the party back thirty years,” said HipHopRepublican.com’s Lenny McAllister, speaking from the floor of the convention hall. “They just voted for a candidate who has a demonstrated tolerance for racial intolerance. She has joked about lynching and then claimed to be a victim. As a black man, I still don’t see what’s funny about that.”

  At least Team Renewal had a sense of humor about the oddly named Indianapolis bar where they told supporters to meet after the vote in an irony-free Tweet: “Come join the NEW YRNF Administration at Rock Bottom!!”

  POLARIZING FOR PROFIT

  We are self-segregating into separate political realities.

  Both Fox News and MSNBC have profited from preaching to a narrow but intense audience—conservative Republicans at Fox and liberal Democrats at MSNBC. Loyal viewers see opinion-anchors like Glenn Beck on the right and Keith Olbermann on the left as the only “truth tellers” in town, while dismissing the rest of the media as cowardly or biased. The ideal of objectivity is now dismissed as a myth. We are devolving back to the era when newspapers were owned and operated by political parties.

  The attack of the Wingnuts is enabled by an increasingly fragmented and hyper-partisan media. Talk radio and Wingnut Web sites pump up the hate and hyper-partisanship all day, creating a feedback loop of talking points for true believers. They are polarizing for profit. It may be good for ratings, but it’s bad for the country.

  The result: partisan warfare is on the rise, and trust in media is on the decline. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has documented the trend and concluded that “virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline” over the past decade.1

  Even C-Span, which offers unedited coverage of public events without commentary, has experienced a steep—and absurd—decline in believability.2 In this hyper-partisan environment, people literally don’t trust what they see with their own eyes.

  The cynicism began with credible accusations of longtime liberal bias inside institutions like CBS News and the New York Times. This in turn ignited conservative talk radio and Fox News as alternatives, the latter sold under the slogan “fair and balanced.” The idea was sinisterly simple: Only explicit bias could balance the implicit bias of the establishment press.

  The problems accelerated with the institution of the “split scream” on twenty-four-hour cable news more than a decade ago—two amped-up partisans from opposing parties screaming talking points at each other, divided by the thin line on your TV screen. The networks pretended that all the heat generated amounted to light as well.

  Things have gotten improbably worse with the innovation of the echo chamber—angry people from the same party inciting each other to extremes on television or online, demonizing a phantom opposition and engaging in a partisan pile-on. Half the time it’s an amen corner and half a hothouse of hate, a reminder of the old adage that “in a place where everybody thinks alike, nobody thinks very much.”

  The echo chamber is a route to radicalization. As Cass Sunstein explains in his book Going to Extremes, “A good way to create an extremist group, or a cult of any kind, is to separate members from the rest of society. The separation can occur physically or psychologically, by creating a sense of suspicion about non-members. With such separation, the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.”3 This dynamic is now occurring on a daily basis.

  It’s been said that the secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience, so they believe that they are as clever as he. Demagogues are the heroes in the echo chamber. They’re selling special knowledge, combining old fears with new technologies and reaching a wider audience than ever before. Their tell-tale signs are much the same as detailed by Richard Hofstadter five decades ago: “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. . . . He is always manning the barricade of civilization. He constantly lives at the turning point: It is now or never in organizing resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out.”4

  This apocalyptic urgency is familiar to listeners to talk radio and viewers of opinion-news today. But maybe Wingnut hosts are also nervous because they fear their time is running out. What’s got them anxious isn’t just politics, it’s their pocketbook.

  Because people have more choices about where to receive their news and opinion, broadcasters are left fighting for a smaller and smaller slice of the pie. “The key to success in modern media is narrow market segmentation,” author and columnist David Frum of FrumForum .com explained to me. “It’s much better to own Ski Magazine than it is to own Life Magazine. And it’s better to own Cross Country Ski Magazine than Ski Magazine. The more precise your marketing the more it delivers eyeballs to advertisers. But in politics, you have to put people together, not slice them apart. So the imperative thing for a successful cable network is very different from a successful national political coalition.”5 This dynamic is driving pundits to the political extremes, providing a financial incentive to incite the Wingnuts.

  It’s a particular problem in talk radio. According to the radio ratings service Arbitron, nearly
two-thirds of talk radio’s listeners are over age fifty, and almost 90 percent are white: Talk radio is preaching to a declining demographic.6 It’s not surprising that according to some industry experts, talk radio has lost 30 to 40 percent of its ad revenues over the past two years alone.7 Its slice of revenue is shrinking.

  Radio host Michael Medved explained it this way to Tim Mak from NewMajority.com: “In this [economic] environment, you have something of a push to be outrageous, to be on the fringe, because what you’re desperately competing for is P-1 listeners [those who tune in most frequently]. And the percentage of people on the fringe who are P-1s is quite high.”8

  As a result, broadcasters who used to present themselves as independent—for example, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz—now dial the partisan anger up to 11 every night. These political performers become prisoners of their own shtick—they cannot evolve or they will be called traitors by the tribe they have cultivated. They can only move in one direction: further out into the extremes.

  This dynamic also inspires the peddling of paranoia to pump up ratings. “What Glenn Beck does is spend three shows speculating about whether the Earth is flat,” contends Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, “and then on the fourth show announces with great fanfare that he, Glenn Beck, has discovered the Earth is round.”9

  Political entertainers pretend to sell ideology and integrity, but what they literally are selling is advertising—and pursuit of coin can also lead to some compromising positions. For example, given the conservatives’ criticism of Obama’s overspending and invocations of Weimar Republic-like inflation (leading, of course, to the rise of a new Hitler), companies selling gold have been buying up the advertising slots on their shows. Again, Glenn Beck’s pitch is typical, blurring the paid advertisement with his personal opinion: “If you’ve been watching for any length of time, and you still haven’t looked into buying gold, what’s wrong with you? . . . When the system eventually collapses, and the government comes with guns and confiscates, you know, everything in your home and all your possessions, and then you fight off the raving mad cannibalistic crowds that Ted Turner talked about, don’t come crying to me. I told you: get gold.”10

  It’s a heated appeal and apparently effective; fear is a powerful motivator. But conflicts of interest were alleged when one advertiser, Peter Epstein of Merit Financial Services, admitted to Politico’s Kenneth P. Vogel that gold retailers expect favorable coverage from their commentators. “You pay anybody on any network and they say what you pay them to say,” said Epstein. “They’re bought and sold.”11

  Loyal audiences are perhaps less understanding of the arrangement. In a complaint filed by Mary Sisak of New Castle, Pennsylvania, she stated that she’d bought gold after she saw a television ad featuring Beck, and online endorsements from radio hosts Fred Thompson and Mark Levin. After spending $5,000, Mary said she learned she could have purchased the same coins for $1,600 less. “How could I be misled by Glenn Beck, Fred Thompson and Marvin [sic] Levin?” she asked. Once you’ve invested your trust in partisan “truth tellers,” heartbreak is sure to follow.

  The cycle is self-reinforcing, providing fodder to a larger partisan enterprise. It’s a dynamic that David Frum calls the Talk-Fox Complex: “Fox News Broadcasting and the major talk radio shows are staffed by many of the same personalities—like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck—and they really work together. Talk radio creates a buzz that the news side of Fox then reports on as if it were straight news.”12 One favorite rhetorical bridge is the “some say” formulation, as in “Some say Barack Obama may not be eligible to be president.” This is one of the mechanisms by which Wingnuts have been able to hijack our media and, by extension, our politics.

  There is a recipe for mainstreaming hyper-partisanship: A rumor is posted on a site like Free Republic and becomes the subject of heated speculation. A site like WorldNetDaily publishes fearmongering as fact or opinion. Now it’s got a thin veneer of respectability and a shot at becoming part of the talk radio conversation, often in the form of “just askin’” speculation (as in “Is Obama our first Muslim Marxist president?”). When a Beck or a Rush Limbaugh picks it up, it’s hit the big time. It’s heading to a protest poster and then a TV screen near you.

  The seamless success of this model in creating issues and crafting narratives has made the out-of-power Republican Party effectively subservient to the conservative media crowd. The tail is wagging the dog; partisan media is driving the GOP’s message and not the other way around. So Glenn Beck declares, “Our country might not survive Barack Obama,” and a few months later, the Republican National Congressional Committee fires off a fundraising letter saying “America cannot survive on this new course.”13 The danger is that the narrow niche-building strategy of partisan news and views is the opposite of the coalition building that political parties use to win elections. Case in point: Glenn Beck.

  Beckology

  The most influential Wingnut leader in the first year of the Obama administration wasn’t an elected official. He isn’t even a Republican but an independent conservative—a former Top-40 radio DJ, self-described “borderline schizophrenic”14 and recovering drug addict turned Mormon convert with a taste for confrontation and confession. He presents a manic mix of politics and religion, loftily billed as “the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.”15

  In the course of a few years, Glenn Beck has transformed himself from a talk radio curiosity into a multimedia cottage industry, with a nationally syndicated radio show, 5 p.m. Fox News program, a magazine and five books—both fiction and nonfiction—on the best-seller lists.16 Behind his tearful Mad Hatter act, the man is crazy like a fox—a talented and intelligent radio artist, an entrepreneur of anxiety and redemption. His loyal customers constitute a standing army, and he has already proven they can be deployed at will to the tune of tens of thousands.

  “We ♥ Glenn Beck” read a sign at the 9/12 Tea Party rally on the Washington Mall. Each letter was spelled out stadium-style on an individual placard with an American flag filling out the heart. The group holding the placards was clustered under a parchment-colored banner that read “Rainy Day Patriots: We the People Fighting to Restore our Constitutional Republic.” Other evidence of his influence dotted the crowd in the form of signs and hand-painted T-shirts: “Answer Glenn Beck’s Questions,” “God Bless Glenn Beck” and “Glenn Beck is my Hero.”

  This was a something of a hometown crowd for Beck. He had first proposed the rally on air months before, telling them they were “the only thing standing between slavery and freedom,” and more than 50,000 citizens came from across the country.17 No member of Congress could have inspired the same attendance.

  Over the week of Thanksgiving 2009, Beck came up with a new cause to coincide with the launch of an upcoming book—The Plan—in August of 2010. With his ambition hitting new heights, Beck announced the creation of a new political movement, part Meet John Doe and part Father Coughlin, complete with public education seminars. “Today, I have stopped looking for a leader to show us the way out,” Beck declared, “because I have come to realize that the only one who can truly save our country . . . is us.”18

  Echoes of Obama’s “We are the change we have been waiting for” aside, self-empowerment is the theme that runs throughout Beckology. Like a classic evangelical preacher who connects with his audience by detailing his days of sin and depravity, Beck uses humor and selfdeprecation to sell his own story of salvation through a return to personal responsibility. Beck comes armed with the dry drunk’s distrust of the middle ground in life and politics, where everything is good versus evil, conservatives versus “the cancer of progressivism,” George Washington versus Barack Obama. But in the duel of opposites, nothing compares to the struggle between Good Beck and Bad Beck.

  The Good Beck genuinely cares about people and this country. It’s one of the things that makes him so emotional on air.

  The Bad Beck is such a talented broadcaster that he knows how to manipulate
an audience’s emotions. He uses fear, anger and resentment to keep their attention day after day, buying his books, attending his rallies.

  The two coexist uneasily under the justification that the Bad Beck promotes the Good Beck. He is advancing himself in order to advance a greater cause.

  To understand Beck’s political appeal, you need a window into his personal life, a story of small-town values remembered from broadcast studios in the sky-scrapers of Manhattan. He grew up in Mount Vernon, Washington, a town of 15,000 in those days, perhaps best known as the tulip bulb capital of America. His dad, William, ran a bakery called the Sweet Tooth and the family attended the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. The town was populated by descendents of Scandinavian immigrants and provided a vision of small-town “real America” that Beck would riff off for decades to come and provide the title for his first book.

  But bucolic visions always obscure a more complicated reality. In addition to tulips, Mount Vernon was earning a reputation as the leading marijuana producer in the Pacific Northwest. Nor were things as they seemed on the surface in Beck’s family. His mom, Mary, wrestled with addiction and manic depression, leading to a marital split and her death by drowning, which police called an accident but Beck believes was a suicide.