{"id":7131,"date":"2015-05-27T13:58:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T13:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/27\/the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio-2\/"},"modified":"2015-05-27T13:58:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T13:58:12","slug":"the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/27\/the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left&#8217;s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">This entry from over five years ago stands up well and is worth re-posting.&#0160; Slightly improved, typos removed, infelicities smoothed.&#0160; It originally saw the light of the &#39;sphere on 24 March 2010.&#0160; As usual the <em>MavPhil<\/em> doctrine of abrogation is in effect:&#0160; later posts abrogate earlier ones.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;..<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">The qualifier &#39;conservative&#39; borders on pleonasm: there is is scarcely any talk radio in the U.S. worth mentioning that is <em>not<\/em> conservative.&#0160; This is part of the reason the Left hates&#0160;the conservative variety&#0160;so much.&#0160; They hate it because of its content, and they hate it because they are incapable of competing with it: their own attempts such as <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Air_America_%28radio_network%29\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">Air America<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\"> have failed miserably. And so, projecting their own hatred,&#0160;they label&#0160;conservative talk&#0160;&#39;hate radio.&#39;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">In a <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/03\/23\/opinion\/23herbert.html\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">22 March&#0160;op-ed piece in the NYT<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">, Bob Herbert, commenting on the G.O.P., writes, &quot;This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.&quot;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">I find that vile outburst fascinating.&#0160; There is no insanity, hatred, or bigotry in any of the conservative talk jocks to whom I listen:&#0160; Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennett, Hugh Hewitt, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager or Michael Medved.&#0160; There is instead common sense, humanity, excellent advice, warnings against extremism, deep life wisdom, facts, arguments, and a reasonably high level of discourse.&#0160; Of the six I have mentioned, Prager and Medved are the best, a fact reflected in their large audiences.&#0160; Don&#39;t you liberals fancy yourselves open-minded?&#0160; Then open your ears!<br \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">So what is it about Herbert and people&#0160; of his ilk that causes them to react routinely in such delusional fashion?<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">It is a long story, of course, but part of it is &#0160;that lefties confuse dissent with hate.&#0160; They don&#39;t seem to realize that if I dissent from your view, it doesn&#39;t follow that I hate you.&#0160; It&#39;s actually a double confusion.&#0160; There is first the confusion of dissent with hate, and then the confusion of persons and propositions. If I dissent from your proposition, it does not follow that I hate your proposition; and <em>a fortiori<\/em> it doesn&#39;t follow that I hate the person who advances the proposition.&#0160; This double confusion goes hand in hand with the strange notion that the Left owns dissent, which I duly refute in a <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/maverickphilosopher.typepad.com\/maverick_philosopher\/2009\/08\/does-the-left-own-dissent.html\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">substantial post<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">I leave you with a quotation from David Horowitz, <strong>Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey<\/strong> (Spence, 2003), p. 273, emphasis added:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">The image of the right that the left has concocted &#8212; authoritarian, reactionary, bigoted, mean-spirited &#8212; is an absurd caricature that has no relation to modern conservatism or to the reality of the people I have come to know in my decade-long movement along the political spectrum &#8212; or to the way I see myself. Except for a lunatic fringe, American conservatism is not about &quot;blood and soil&quot; nostalgia or conspiracy paranoia, which figure so largely in imaginations that call themselves &quot;liberal,&quot; but are anything but. Modern American conservatism is a reform movement that seeks to reinvent free markets and limited government and to restore somewhat traditional values. <strong>Philosophically, conservatism is more accurately seen as a species of liberalism itself<\/strong> &#8212; and would be more often described in this way were it not for the hegemony the left exerts in the political culture and its appropriation of the term &quot;liberal&quot; to obscure its radical agenda.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Georgia;\">One more thing.&#0160; You can see from Herbert&#39;s picture that he is black. So now I will be called a racist for exposing his outburst.&#0160; That is right out of the Left&#39;s playbook:&#0160; if a conservative disagrees with you on any issue, or proffers any sort of criticism, then you heap&#0160;abuse on him.&#0160; He&#39;s a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a &#39;homophobe,&#39; a bigot, a religious zealot . . . .<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This entry from over five years ago stands up well and is worth re-posting.&#0160; Slightly improved, typos removed, infelicities smoothed.&#0160; It originally saw the light of the &#39;sphere on 24 March 2010.&#0160; As usual the MavPhil doctrine of abrogation is in effect:&#0160; later posts abrogate earlier ones. &#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;.. The qualifier &#39;conservative&#39; borders on pleonasm: there &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/05\/27\/the-lefts-hatred-of-conservative-talk-radio-2\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Left&#8217;s Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,163,120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism","category-leftism-and-political-correctness","category-media-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}