Michael Savage

Has anyone listen to The Savage Nation, a rightwing talk radio show, hosted by nationalist Michael Savage since 1994.

Savage is one of the most listened to talk show hosts in America, which has vaulted him to the Talk Radio Hall of Fame.

I don’t care for his Trump approval, but he is very intelligent. He has a master’s collegiate degree in medical botany and anthropology at the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. in nutritional botany from the University of California, Berkley.

Not me.

Always flattered to hear somebody endorsing the assumption that having a Ph.D. automatically makes a person “very intelligent”, irrespective of whether or not the subject of their doctoral work has anything to do with what they’re expressing opinions about. But I’m not sure it holds up in Michael Savage’s case. For one thing, his endorsement of homeopathy doesn’t speak well for his intelligence.

Summary from above link:

He is rightwing, yes.

What makes a person intelligent in your opinion?

What has homeopathy to do with being right wing?

I’m vaguely aware of Savage being a right wing nut who says hateful things (didn’t he once tell a caller that he hoped the caller got AIDS and died?) but he doesn’t really take up much space in my brain.

Why is this in the Pit? What’s your opinion of him?

I think Savage is rude and nuts, but he makes good points about society. America is losing social cohesion of community.

America has a social issue.

I don’t know, but right wingers eat that shit up. The left isn’t immune to it, by any means, but right wing loons seem to have had a lot more success peddling it - almost all these shrieking demagogues like Savage have a major side-line in snake oil.

“Social cohesion of community” . . . what the fuck is that, and when did America have more of it???

CMC fnord!

Largely thanks to Michael Savage and his ilk spewing their rudeness and nuttiness all over the place, as Defensive Indifference recalled:

The fact that someone like Savage can make millions off of decades of whipping up his fellow conservatives to hate people, and then be taken seriously by them when he whines that America is “losing social cohesion”, merely demonstrates how abjectly conservatives in general these days have abandoned critical thinking and regard for facts.

They dilute facts until they’re nonexistent, and peddle the result as remedies for society?

Michael Moore, Cenk Ugyr whips up fellow progressives to hate people as well. Both sides have their crackpots.

A sense of belonging.

A sense that Americans have a bond of honor, trust, strength, faith.

Those things have been lost since the 1990s.

In the 1990s, Pat Buchanan declared at the RNC that “there is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America,” because of things like “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” James Byrd, Jr. was dragged to death because he was black. Mathew Shepard was beaten and left to die because he was gay. Abortion clinics were bombed. The Oklahoma Federal Building was bombed. The Unabomber was active. And Rush Limbaugh was building his media empire by incessantly attacking feminazis, communists, the NAACP (“The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.”), and anyone else he could demonize.

You really think that there was a sense of belonging for all Americans in the 1990s?

The OP’s posting style reminds me very much of someone else.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is though.

There’s something about the cadence of his posts that’s familiar to me.

Interesting how that works, isn’t it?

I wonder if it’s just a coincidence.

Are we ever going to know the truth?

I hope so. But maybe it’s just not in the cards.

Something Aaron Sorkin wrote in friggin’ 1995 in “The American President”

You’d think people would eventually learn better than to fall for nostalgia and the ‘better days’ trap. But nope. PT Barnum nailed it. One born every second.

Point. I think maybe what the OP is experiencing as “loss of social cohesion” is mostly just the long-overdue realization that straight white traditional-family-values-type Americans aren’t automatically going to be the people in charge of running everything in the country, and aren’t even always going to be a majority in the country.

Personally, I’ve got plenty of social cohesion with everybody from the ladies in the local quilting group (many of whom are probably Trump voters but we’re not there to talk politics) to my fellow demonstrators at the climate protests. If you need the illusion of constant agreement and social uniformity to be able to feel a sense of community, then you probably never really had any “social cohesion” in the first place.

Has nothing to do with race so I don’t know race got brought up at all. What I am talking about is no sense of faith, no sense of valor. Nothing to do with race. Nothing to do with race.

Talking heads are not the issue, necessarily. Its about faith, vigor, valor.

:confused: “No sense of faith” in what way? Religious faith? “No sense of valor” in what way? AFAICT there are about as many brave people around as there ever were, and appreciation levels for them are about the same.

:confused: :confused: “Vigor”? I think you’re going to have to explain exactly what it is you’re talking about. It may seem obvious to you that America is suffering from a loss of “faith, vigor, valor”, but that sounds absolutely meaningless to me (unless by the “faith” bit you mean that more Americans are identifying as non-religious nowadays, which I agree is factually true).

That’s your argument, “they do it too!” ?

Not very convincing, dude.