Shortly after returning from SW Missouri I checked my inbox, there to find an evening wrapup from The Atlantic's Tom Nichols, who opened by comparing the bloody, intensely meaningful American Civil War to "the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life" in our current civil war.
I can attest to its bizarre, fully baked wackiness, having just listened to hours of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, the Brian Kilmeade and Charlie Kirk programs and local talk radio out of Springfield, Mo. Nichols writes that "The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real."
Affirmative. On the Trump=document scandal, all the radio shows "informed" their listeners that the Department of Justice could have simply asked Trump to return the to-secret papers, rather than "raiding" his his home. Of course, DOJ did ask Trump to return the documents — repeatedly.
Trump refused, at one point having one of his lawyers sign a statement attesting to the absence of any further records at Mar-a-Lago. None of this was conveyed to listeners, so naturally they were up in arms, believing the DOJ and FBI willfully abused a former U.S. president, their president.
The Trump controversy, however, was not at the top of the shows' outrage list. First was the Inflation Reduction Act, whose title the hosts relentlessly referred to as "Orwellian" because they had heard ABC's Jonathan Karl use the term in a news broadcast. Billions and billions of wasted money, they said, all of it merely to please the left's radical agenda.
Then came the scare story of more than a hundred thousand armed IRS agents coming to homes all across America. People earning as little as $20,000, said the hosts, would be paying more in taxes under the dreaded Inflation Reduction Act. So beware. Finally, the anniversary of the Afghanistan debacle, which the hosts used as a kind of pole vault jump into the destruction of the United States' reputation worldwide.
Concluded Nichols, "What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it." That also I can attest to. While on the road, I called in to the local Springfield station to correct a series of falsehoods just spread on the air by the host. He cut my mic and explained to the listening audience that I was one of those radical leftists who lies about everything.
Nichols also notes that he recently spoke with an "original Never Trumper" over the weekend who related that his family and friends "now say that they believe that Trump broke the law—but that they don’t care." That was not my experience Friday and today. The program hosts instead related that Trump had broken no laws. I assume their listeners believed it.
The hours I spent with these radio shows were deeply depressing. There was no pretense of even a loose familiarity with reality. It was, in a word, otherworldly.