Charlie Sykes is a right wing talk show host from Wisconsin who is quitting his show and has a very informative analysis of what has happened to the conservative movement. He’s one of the few Republicans who we may strongly disagree with on policy, but who have seen what the Republicans have done to their country and are putting their country before their party.
The conservative media is broken and the conservative movement deeply compromised.
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In short, I was under the impression that conservatives actually believed things about free trade, balanced budgets, character and respect for constitutional rights. Then along came this campaign.
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On the surface, the explanations for Mr. Trump’s improbable win in Wisconsin are simple enough… Democrats simply stayed home, though that is obviously not the whole story.
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What they did buy into was the argument that this was a “binary choice.” No matter how bad Mr. Trump was, my listeners argued, he could not possibly be as bad as Mrs. Clinton. You simply cannot overstate this as a factor in the final outcome. As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas, to parties, to tribes, to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.
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In this political universe, voters accept that they must tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse; the stakes are such that no qualms can get in the way of the greater cause.
For many listeners, nothing was worse than Hillary Clinton. Two decades of vilification had taken their toll:… they generally refused to accept evidence that came from outside their bubble. The echo chamber had morphed into a full-blown alternate reality silo of conspiracy theories, fake news and propaganda.
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When it became clear that I was going to remain #NeverTrump, conservatives I had known and worked with for more than two decades organized boycotts of my show.
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One staple of every radio talk show was, of course, the bias of the mainstream media. This was, indeed, a target-rich environment. But as we learned this year, we had succeeded in persuading our audiences to ignore and discount any information from the mainstream media.
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We destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless voices on the right.
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Now that the election is over, don’t expect any profiles in courage from the Republican Party pushing back against those trends
This may be the best analysis of our current political situation that I’ve seen. When the people who built the right wing bubble realize what they’ve done and publicly denounce the results, we really need to listen.
Resist! Go click on the link so the NYT knows that this is the type of commentary we need more of.