Callum Borchers writes for the Washington Post:
In future elections, Republicans seeking office will have to answer an important question: Where did you stand on Donald Trump?
Some seem acutely aware of this looming litmus test and are riding the fence (See: Ryan, Paul). Others are boldly offering what they hope will be the right answer.
Ted Cruz, counting on a Trump defeat in November, has positioned himself as a principled holdout, apparently convinced that refusing to endorse his party’s presidential nominee will boost his 2020 stock among Republican voters, who will realize they nominated the wrong candidate this time around. Chris Christie, betting on a Trump victory, could be angling for a cabinet appointment but, absent that, may be setting himself up to be able to say in his next campaign that he got in on the ground floor of a rebuilt GOP.
The same thing is happening in the conservative media. Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Breitbart News are all in for Trump. If he wins, they can rightly claim to be the voices of the party — or, at least, the wing of it — in power. If he loses, fierce Trump critics such as Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol and the National Review will enjoy a kind of told-you-so validation that could bolster their credibility going forward.
There aren’t any pundits in the MSM who are important anymore except for Ann Coulter, who inspired Donald Trump’s anti-immigration message. Otherwise, pundits get paid for serving an audience what they want to hear.
A long-time favorite pundit of mine, Dennis Prager, loved President George W. Bush whose dubious legacy includes occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at a cost of trillions of dollars on the false premises that these countries threatened America, removing standards for mortgage lending to racial minorities unlikely to repay such loans sending America into the worst recession since the Great Depression, allowing in millions of low-achieving illegal immigrants from Mexico, and campaigning in 2000 against profiling Arabs at airports.
Dennis wrote Mar. 11, 2003: "I believe that either divine intervention or good luck on the magnitude of a lottery win explains George W. Bush’s rise to the position of president."
Dennis wrote Feb. 3, 2004:
I have loved and admired this man [George W. Bush] ever since I felt that I got to know him during his presidential campaign. (Before his winning the Republican nomination, I knew so little about him and thought so little of his chances of defeating Al Gore that I voted in the California primary for John McCain.) I believe that this man is changing history for the better, that he is the dam holding back the waters of chaos, that he saved this country at a time when Democrats would have failed it, and that he is both kind and strong, real and decent, powerful and humble.
So when I had the opportunity to stand in line with my wife and youngest child to simply shake this man’s hand, I rushed at the opportunity. I waited in line as excited as most people would be to greet their favorite Hollywood star. Wearing a silly grin, I told the congressmen and senators around me that I felt like a 7-year-old about to meet Willie Mays or Derek Jeter. I even broke into a sweat.
…My wife told him that when she lights the Sabbath candles every Friday night in our home, she says a prayer for him. And I told him that I say a prayer for him each week at synagogue.
Unless he is a faker — and I believe that I can sense a faker a mile away — it was clear that the president was moved. Which is exactly what we hoped for. We know how much he values prayer, we know how much hatred he receives, and we suspect that he does not often associate Jews with those prayerfully supporting him.
He stopped and told us that only those who understand prayer could understand how much this means to him and asked if we would like a family photo with him. Imagine your child getting to take a photo with every member on his favorite baseball or football team and you can imagine my excitement.
Lawrence Auster wrote in 2005 that folks like Dennis had already given away the game:
Our quasi-religious faith in America as the spreader of freedom around the world grows in proportion as our actual America loses its culture, its morality, its spiritual and historical cohesion, and its will to defend itself, not to mention its real liberties, which are not to be confused with its modern, liberationist liberties. We can’t defend the actual America anymore, because we fear that we’ve already given so much of it away that the attempt to bring it back would make us seem like extremists or cranks. So, needing something to believe in, but no longer having a real country to believe in, we turn what’s left of our country into a mission to achieve universal democracy, and we believe in that instead.
The more we empty our country of its historical meaning, the more hysterical becomes our embrace of Bush’s messianic rhetoric, which is not about America, but about the world.
After 2007, few people aside from Prager saw Bush in a positive light. Steve Sailer, for instance, saw W. as "Chauncey Gardiner with a mean streak", "irresponsible" and "uninterested in proficiency and honesty".
As a Sailer reader wrote in 2006:
…[T]he pundits look like complete fools: the conservative pundits who decided to become Bush cultists in 2002-4 are now forced to grapple with the fact that they've been defending a complete failure, and the milquetoast "liberal" pundits — the ones who wrote that Bush was basically a good guy, beloved by all, and the Democrats needed to go along with the Iraq war but pledge to do it more competently (the TNR/Washington Post type of "liberals") — are also looking like idiots.
Among the mainstream punditariat I'm now seeing a certain amount of incoherent rage, usually directed at the "isolationist right" (if the pundit's conservative) or the "angry left" (if the pundit's liberal). It's the rage of bubble-dwelling pundits who can't forgive the "extreme" left and right for having been right all along while they were busy writing about what a swell guy Bush is.
Looking back from 2014, the careers of the pundits who were wrong about invading Iraq (Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Fred Kagan, Robert Kagan, Victor Davis Hanson, John Podhoretz, William Kristol, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Peter Beinart, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Fareed Zakaria) have prospered while those who were right (William S. Lind, Robert Scheer, Jonathan Schell, and Scott Ritter) have had few rewards. The pro-invasion pundits appearing on Prager's radio show between 2002-2012 outnumbered the opposed by about ten to one and being massively wrong did nothing to diminish their air time (on Prager's show and elsewhere).
As with prostitution, success in punditry has nothing to do with being right (witness the success of frauds Malcolm Gladwell and Steven "Freakanomics" Levitt) and everything to do with serving customers what they want.
Dennis supported invading and occupying Afghanistan after 9/11 ("I'd rather die fighting evil than live ignoring it, and that goes for my children," said Dennis May 9, 2014 in support of American intervention in Afghanistan and elsewhere) but he had no position on the invasion of Iraq in 2003, calling it the greatest gamble by a president in a century. Once the battle joined, Dennis said America had to win for the sake of its prestige. In other words, "keep shoving American troops and money into a meatgrinder" for honor.
John Mearsheimer wrote in 2014:
As Daryl G. Press notes in his important book, Calculating Credibility, when a country backs down in a crisis, its credibility in subsequent crises is not reduced. “A country’s credibility, at least during crises,” he writes, “is driven not by its past behavior but rather by power and interests." Thus, the fact that America suffered a humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War did not lead Moscow to think that the U.S. commitment to defend Western Europe was not credible.
Nov. 1, 2010, Dennis said: “When George W. Bush won the second time, I came close to sobbing on the air out of relief because I knew we would’ve left Iraq, among other things.”
After the last American troops left Iraq August 18, 2010, what exactly was accomplished at the cost of seven trillion dollars? On Feb. 20, 2014, Dennis said: "In Iraq we fought the greatest evil of our time today, the violent Islamists, we defeated them, we defeated one of the most grotesque dictators of the 20th Century, and if we had stayed there, just as we did in Japan, Korea and Germany, there would have been a lot more peace today."
Dennis said October 28, 2008: “If John Kerry had won [in 2004], we would’ve been defeated in Iraq. A defeat in Iraq would have reverberated around in the world in a massive renaissance of Islamic terror. The United States of America would’ve been defeated by Al Qaeda and other terrorists and it would not end. This war would’ve only increased.”
A Lawrence Auster reader wrote July 3, 2012:
Conservative talk radio seems to have a similar theme throughout today. Each host I’ve listened to wonders where our patriotism has gone. This is interesting, considering that these so-called conservatives are in step with the liberal zeitgeist: they believe multiculturalism and diversity is a great thing which makes our country stronger.
Amazing that these hosts can tout the strength of such nation-destroying policies, while wondering why we aren’t as patriotic as we previously were. It’s as if they don’t understand that under our liberal belief system the less patriotic you actually are, the more American you are. Today, a patriot is one who is a recent immigrant who wants all traditional American edifices destroyed and believes equality is the founding principle of the nation. The patriots of yesteryear are bigots, meaning they are the anti-patriots.
Auster replied:
You have well described the schizophrenia that characterizes essentially ALL mainstream conservatives. Like Dennis Prager, they want to America to keep receiving all peoples as immigrants including Muslims, and they want American “Judeo-Christian” traditions to be protected and enforced. Like Norman Podhoretz, they redefine America as an abstract Proposition Nation equally open to all races and cultures on earth, and they complain about how Americans have “lost their voices,” their ability to stand up against multiculturalism.
The mainstream conservatives have two utterly contradictory values—the nondiscriminatory inclusion in America of everyone in the world, and the preservation of America as a special country and culture. They cannot see the contradiction or extricate themselves from it, because both these values are sacred to them. For them to recognize that their belief in non-discriminatory openness dooms the nation and must be abandoned, would be to lose what is the “highest” to them, it would be to lose themselves, so they can’t even conceive of it.
Auster wrote Nov. 20, 2012: "Victor Hanson keeps evoking race blindness as the true American ideal, not recognizing that the race blindness to which he is unquestioningly devoted produced the immigration policies which gave decisive political power in this country to race-conscious nonwhites and thus assured the doom of his own race-blind ideals."
A reader replied:
Back in the 1990s, Dennis Prager made a comment on his show one day that is so engraved in my memory I can quote it, I believe, verbatim, even after all these years: “When I see millions of Mexicans coming to this country, I don’t feel concerned. I feel complimented.” Prager believed that Mexicans, by the very act of coming here, were symbolically taking some sort of vow that they renounced The Mexican Way (including its native tribalism) and were now eager to embrace his superior European-American values and culture with open arms. Some years later, when three million illegal aliens poured into the streets of Los Angeles waving Mexican flags and signs that declared things like, “Go back to Europe. This is our territory now,” Prager came on the air and in this whiny, disillusioned voice lamented, “Couldn’t there be just ONE sign that said, “Thank you Americans, for allowing us into your great country?”
Another reader wrote:
Prager is also baffled that Christians do not have telethons and raise private armies to fight the persecution of brother Christians across the globe, in contrast to Jews’ rallying support of Soviet Jewry, Ethiopians, and whatnot. I am baffled that Prager, a member of a race that calls itself “The Tribe,” is outright blind to the difference between the religions: Judaism is rooted in blood, Christianity in hearts and minds. Obviously, the tribal ties are bound tighter.
An Auster reader wrote in 2006:
…Dennis Prager who rhapsodize about the mild manners and superior spirituality of Mestizo Mexicans should realize that, to date, these trespassers have enjoyed unremitting success in achieving what must be beyond even their own wildest dreams: the subversion of the laws, occupation of the territory, and displacement of the culture of the mighty U.S., with almost no resistance from the populace or government. But what will occur if/when these smiling, good-hearted migrants are ever denied, or even frustrated, in seizing the bounty they have come to believe is theirs for the taking may be something other than peaceful. As one American of Mexican descent who supports border control warned on a local L.A. blog recently, “You Anglos have no idea the s**t that is heading our way if we try to stop these people from coming. As for myself, I’m buying ammunition.”
Apr. 18, 2014, Dennis said: "I have reluctantly concluded that for me the political ship has sailed… I'm torn… My dream is not to be president, but to have the audience the president has."
According to a 2016 thread on Reddit, a poster wrote: "I am a reporter at a conservative radio station. This is part of a document my boss asked me to read."
The Lund Talk Radio Stylebook Page 4 of 50
To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.
The enemy can be a politician — either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a "RINO" (a "Republican In Name Only," who is deemed not conservative enough. It can be the cold cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the "mainstream media…"
Forget any notion, however, that radio talk shows are supposed to be fair, evenhanded discussions featuring a diversity of opinions. The Fairness Doctrine, which required this, was repealed 20 years ago. So talk shows can be, and are, all about the host's opinions, analyses and general worldview. Programmers learned long ago that benign conversations led by hosts who present all sides of an issue don't attract large audiences.
