On today’s issue of “no shit Sherlock,” a rightwing radio host is on the cusp of an existential crisis as he questions his involvement in a fact-averse American electorate:
“We’ve basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers. There’s nobody. Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood,” he explained. “The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that. ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bullshit.’”
According to Sykes, any attempts to continue fighting back against misinformation is dismissed with complaints that he has “sold out,” adding, “Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”
Sykes warned “There’s got to be a reckoning on all this.”
“We’ve created this monster,” he warned. “Look, I’m a conservative talk show host. All conservative talk show hosts have basically established their brand as being contrasted with the mainstream media. So we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media. And by the way, a lot has been justifiable. There is real bias. But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there.”
“And I feeling, to a certain extent, that we are reaping the whirlwind at that,” he continued. “And I have to look in the mirror and ask myself, ‘To what extent did I contribute?’”
Nope, couldn’t be connected with The Terrible Fascist Cheeto. Nothing to see here, folks. Remember: Feelings are facts, up is down, and Mexicans are taking yer jerbs, and if you pray hard enough you will be forgiven for being a selfish piece of… work.
-Shiv
They have not yet begun to reap the whirlwind. The whirlwind is when everyone stops listening to them entirely, because they just talk lies. Then they’ll be talking and going, “hey! why is nobody listening?” (crickets)
This guy isn’t the only one who has been staring into the mirror recently and wondering if he made some poor life choices. Guess the source of this quote:
(Yes, I know this is quoting a video that went around a few weeks ago. It was an effective video, but I would never have guessed how effective.)
The answer is Glenn Beck. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/15/glenn-beck-urges-conservatives-to-understand-black-lives-matter/
Joe Walsh seems particularly appropo at the moment.
The Confessor
This malaise actually has very little to do with Trump. They have been headed down this path for many years, turning conservative media into a closed loop of misinformation long before he hopped aboard and contributed to it.
Did he just admit that the only credible outlets are the liberal ones?
You can almost see the smoke blowing out of his ears.