I occasionally watch PBS News to see what news of the day is being omitted. Yesterday I happened onto the PBS News approach to the Alt Right, which they had just discovered somehow. Here's how they approached it: they had a WaPo Leftist and a NeoCon in an interview to tell the world about the Alt Right. It apparently did not occur to them to interview any member of the Alt Right to ask about their views, like maybe Milo. So the interview revealed that that the Alt Right has been around for a long time in the form of white supremacy, misogeny, and of course the ever popular racism.
Now that it has established that as Fact, the term, "Alt Right", can be used as a pejorative, a smear on the thoroughly reviled Donald Trump. If "Alt Right" means "evil" and is attached to Trump, well you see the game.
Hillary actually went to the gutter with KKK attachments to Trump. From now until November, Hillary lies will fill the air, funded by billionaires who want her in the presidency. The first trillionaires will be funded by Hillary's administration, if...
Teddy Roosevelt, where are you??
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Having nothing better to do on the commute home, I turned on Talk Radio, Sean Hannity this afternoon. he was bemoaning the latest Clinton "raciss KKK" speech about Trump. He frankly admitted (without realizing it) that he was clueless about the Alt-Right. He had never heard of it, and, of course, that means they don't exist. He then tried to parse Conservatism, Inc. as the possible Alt-Right, laying out various alternatives.
I stopped putting any credence in Hannity or Beck some time ago. They are clueless. Apparently, their staff researchers are clueless as well. It doesn't take a nuclear rocket basket weaver to be able to search using Google and find out SOMETHING, ANYTHING, about the Alt-Right. Instead, they bloviate endlessly about crap they are manifestly ignorant about.
Here's a Beck juicy tidbit from his book Dreamers and Deceivers. Beck buys into the thoroughly discredited stories about Alan Turing, the "forgotten man" of computing. He peddles the tired old story about the Apple, Inc. logo being related to Turing's suicide by eating a poisoned apple. The actual designer of the logo has related why there is a "bite" out of the Apple: it is a standard way to bring the attention to the logo by distinguishing it from a cherry. And as for the "forgotten man" (according to Beck, the "inventor" of the modern computer) Alan Turing: a certain John von Neumann first articulated the idea of storing instructions and data in the same memory. A certain Charles Babbage created a mechanical computer long before that. As for the "forgotten man" crap: The Association for Computing Machinery (the premier international professional society for computer science) offers the A.M. Turing Award, ACM's most prestigious technical award, given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing. But, somehow, that equates to "forgetting" about Turing.
Apparently serious "journalists" like Hannity and Beck can't be bothered to spend just a little time researching their various claims before rushing to the microphone and the camera to breathlessly "inform" their audience.
Little wonder that the Alt-Right has grown like a mushroom in the cellar, with gatekeepers like these manning the gates of True Conservatism, Inc.
You know, I used to agree with Beck on a lot of stuff; still do. But then he started getting sloppy. And just got sloppier, and more shrill, as time passed. I know he's got a scad of researchers, but like that embarrassing bit in his book (I bought it - it was pretty good, actually, except for Turing), you wonder if he's just phoning some of this stuff in because he's spread himself so thin.
I don't consider either of those two to be journalists. They're conservative talk show hosts working radio and tv. I listen to their message, but I gotta wonder exactly who their target audience is, given the commercials I hear aired every fifteen minutes. Did you know that if you subtract the commercials by other companies from the show, and then subtract the announcer's commercials for other companies, you end up with only 28 minutes of actual show for each hour on the air?
There are an increasing number of commercials that repeat their contact info four times or more (which is a dead givaway that they are a scam aimed at dumb people). Add this to Hannity or Beck or whoever doing commercials for mattresses and other stuff in their own voice (the announcer states that you've returned to the Lars Larson show, then Lars himself starts right into a pitch for new roofing) and you get the strong feeling that these guys, while saying things I agree with, don't have the greatest respect for the intelligence of their listening audience.
Maybe they're correct?
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