Conservative Lies and Hate Reached and Deceived Millions

Most people here know this, but it bears repeating. Conservative propaganda is spewing poison that reaches millions of listeners every day. The poison foments baseless fear, anger and an appetite to avenge the illusory liberal onslaught and all the imagined horrors and moral outrages. The New York Times writes:

Shows hosted by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other talk radio stars promoted debunked claims of a stolen election and urged listeners to “fight back.”

Two days before a mob of Trump supporters invaded the United States Capitol, upending the nation’s peaceful transition of power and leaving at least five people dead, the right-wing radio star Glenn Beck delivered a message to his flock of 10.5 million listeners: “It is time to fight.”

“It is time to rip and claw and rake,” Mr. Beck said on his Jan. 4 broadcast. “It is time to go to war, as the left went to war four years ago.”

Mark Levin, who reaches an estimated 11 million listeners a week, said in a Christmas broadcast that stealing elections “is becoming the norm for the Democrat Party” and called on his listeners to “crush them, crush them. We need to kick their ass.”

Bill Cunningham, a syndicated host in Cincinnati, told listeners on Jan. 4: “I will never surrender and collapse and act as if it’s OK when hundreds of thousands have voted illegally.” On Jan. 5, as Trump supporters started to converge on Washington, Dan Bongino, the host of a popular podcast and nationally syndicated radio show, said that Democrats “rigged the rules to make sure that any potential outcome would go their way.”

Leading radio anchors did not explicitly urge an assault on the Capitol, and Mr. Trump often spoke more brazenly than his media counterparts, including in a speech to his supporters in Washington just before the riot. But it was no accident that regular listeners to Mr. Limbaugh and others believed that a grave misdeed had occurred in the 2020 vote count.

On Dec. 16, Mr. Limbaugh — the country’s No. 1 radio host, with an audience of about 15.5 million a week — told listeners that Mr. Biden “didn’t win this thing fair and square, and we are not going to be docile like we’ve been in the past, and go away and wait till the next election.”  

This type of push-and-pull — stoking listeners’ anger, then pulling back and disavowing the more extreme views voiced by callers — is typical of corporate right-wing radio hosts, whose success relies on provocation but whose multimillion-dollar paychecks depend on staying within the bounds of their publicly traded distributors.

Ellul died in 1994, years before the rise of social media 

as a powerful source of propaganda 

Well, if Limbaugh tells millions to not be docile and don't go away, and Beck tells his listeners to “crush them, crush them. We need to kick their ass.”, what on Earth are these propagandists telling people to do? Be nice and respectfully talk through the problems to reach a compromise? 

Hell no that is not what these far right wing fascist leaders are saying. They are directly fomenting anger, hate civil strife, not respect, discussion of grievances or democratic compromise. They helped foment the coup attempt on Jan. 6. Because of their immoral behavior, they bear some responsibility for the coup attempt.

Why do these people do such bad things? Maybe some actually believe their own lies. More likely, most do it mostly for the money, with or without believing the lies. Once when Limbaugh was heavily criticized, he defended himself by saying that he was just an entertainer, implying that nothing he said should be taken seriously. Either way, these propagandist-entertainer-whatevers act as lying, anti-democratic fascists. What they believe or what their motives are is beside the point. That makes them deeply immoral at least, but more plausibly evil because their words convey malice. These people are epistemic terrorists.

Is that analysis unreasonable or not supported by facts or sound reasoning?