Lately I’ve been listening to right-wing talk radio, to try to understand its attractions. In particular, I’ve been listening to Michael Savage and Mark Levin. These men are both conservative radio hosts with millions of weekly listeners. I have to admit, after more than a month of listening, I find it really hard to understand their appeal.

In some ways, Savage and Levin are very similar. They both use extensive call screening, so that practically no dissenting voices are ever allowed on the air. During the past month, I think I haven’t heard a single liberal caller on either program. If they do manage to get on somehow, they typically get shouted down and cut off.

They both shill for their own books, with Levin pushing Plunder and Deceit and Savage pushing Government Zero. They both advertise their books about dogs, with Savage pushing Teddy and Me, and Levin pushing a book written by his father, My Dog Spot. They both shill for companies that sell precious metals as investments, with Levin pushing Goldline and Savage pushing Swiss America. Levin also shills for AMAC (which bills itself as the conservative alternative to AARP) and Dollar Shave Club.

For radio professionals, they both seem to have trouble pronouncing certain words. Levin once referred to Mallorca as “Mall-er-ka”, and Savage pronounced “fiefdom” as “fife-dum”.

They both always refer to the “Democrat party”, a typical epithet of the far right.

They both love to name-call. Levin constantly uses terms like “puke”, “hack”, “jerk”, and “punk” to describe anybody he disagrees with. Sometimes he calls people “subhuman”. If there exists a single person in the world who is both personally honorable and disagrees with Levin on some substantive issue, you would not know about it by listening to him. For example, he called Elizabeth Warren “one of the biggest idiots”, “a complete freak” and a “dimwitted buffoon”. (He has a particular dislike for university professors.) Levin routinely refers to the New York Times as the “New York Slimes”, the Washington Post as the “Washington Compost”, MSNBC as “MSLSD”, Associated Press as “Associated Depressed”, Hillary Clinton as “Hillary Rotten Clinton”. I guess he thinks he’s being clever. Savage, on the other hand, routinely refers to people he disagrees with as “garbage” or “vermin”. He particularly dislikes Muslims, which he enjoys calling “Moose-lims”. He calls Rachel Maddow “Rachel Madcow”.

Both Savage and Levin like to portray themselves as brave, honest commentators who say what others dare not.  When Levin says, “There!  I said it!” you know for sure that something particularly ignorant has just preceded it.

Probably the most important commonality between Levin and Savage is they both lie. Unrelentingly. Repeatedly. In listening for a month or so, there were so many lies that I often had trouble recording them all. They’re not lying about things whose truth is hard to determine, either. Here are just a few:

• Mark Levin claimed “nobody watches CBS News”. In fact, in 2015, viewership was 6.8 million, up 4% from previously, or about the same as Levin’s own audience size.
• Michael Savage lied about what Mark Tushnet said here, claiming Tushnet advocated treating conservatives like Nazis.
• Mark Levin claimed Marx and Engels invented the term “middle class”. Not true, of course: it was James Bradshaw in 1745.
• Michael Savage claimed Japan never apologized for the Bataan death march. But they did, 6 years ago.
• Mark Levin twice claimed that “gun shows are the safest place on earth”, despite being informed that this is simply not the case: accidental shootings at gun shows are routine.

Many more examples can be found on my twitter feed. Despite these lies, in my listening for more than a month I never heard either host issue a correction or retraction about anything. (In contrast, Rachel Maddow issues corrections all the time.)

Both hosts have their obsessions. Levin is completely obsessed with Barack Obama; nearly every show is on the same theme, about how Obama is destroying America. Obama, Levin claims, is “sick” and “hates America”. Similarly, Savage is obsessed with Obama, calling him a “psychopath”, but his obsessions also include George Soros, Google, Hollywood, and Facebook, frequently insulting Mark Zuckerberg (often with exaggerated Jewish accent) and Jeff Bezos. Indeed, although Savage is Jewish (his real name is Michael Weiner), many of his comments seem either overtly or covertly anti-Semitic.

Both hosts have extremely high opinions of themselves. Savage has a doctorate from Berkeley in ethnomedicine, which he frequently likes to mention (callers often call him “Dr. Savage”), and likes to boast for minutes at a time about how smart he is compared to everyone else. He says, “I’m far more creative, inventive, entertaining, informative, educated than everyone else in the history of radio.” However, he’s not as smart as he thinks: for example, Savage frequently uses the term “coelenterate” and says it means the same as “worm”. (Coelenterates are not worms or even closely related to them. They are creatures like jellyfish and sea anemones.) Here Savage quotes Hillel’s famous questions, but attributes them wrongly to Maimonides.  On the other hand, Levin’s website describes him as “The Great One” or “Denali”, terms which Levin embraces with enthusiasm. He frequently turns testy, telling callers that he is going to “educate” them.

Despite their great similarities, both hosts apparently dislike the other one. Indeed, it seems that both are quite reluctant to mention the other by name. Levin has called Savage “a real cancer” and a “phony, fake conservative”.

Nevertheless, there are some differences between them. Savage, by far, has the stranger life story, whereas Levin had a more conventional career at the fringes of American right. Savage supports Donald Trump and Levin was a strong supporter of Ted Cruz. (Whether Levin will eventually back Trump is hard to tell, although I suspect he will eventually cave.) Savage seems to have no coherent political philosophy at all, other than his dislike of various minorities. For example, he seems to hate gay people, once telling a caller that he “should get AIDS and die … eat a sausage and choke on it”. Like his hero Trump, Savage seems to be a fascist in training; he admires Vladimir Putin and thinks bringing back the House Un-American Activities Committee would be a good idea. Levin is somewhat more consistent philosophically, claiming to be a “constitutional conservative”. However, his idea of the constitution is extremely narrow; it never seems to occur to him that there might be two or more different ways of interpreting constitutional provisions. Levin used to work under Ed Meese, whom he calls a “great man”. But remember that Meese did not believe in the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”; he once said, “If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect.” Levin also buys into the typical craziness of the right, denying man-made global warming and claiming that environmentalists are responsible for the deaths of millions of people from malaria.

Savage seems genuinely unbalanced to me. For example, he thinks seltzer water is dangerous and claims that seltzer water has damaged Bernie Sanders’ sanity. He says things like, “I am a prophet. I have been a prophet. I was appointed to be a prophet since birth.” Levin is better, but his sanity is also not so clear to me. He once claimed violating transgender guidelines will get you put in “Leavenworth Prison” and once agreed with a caller that if Obama had been president during US Civil War “he would have continued slavery”. But perhaps these are just wild hyperbole as opposed to being actually crazy.

After a month of listening, I still don’t quite understand their appeal. Savage is an ignorant narcissist who is filled with hate. Levin is a boring partisan and ideologue with a single theme that he repeats with hardly any variation. Neither host is much concerned with the truth. Both like to hear themselves rant, and, despite praising their audience, rarely genuinely engage with any caller.

If these are the minds that the American right listens to on a daily basis, it’s no wonder that the right is so badly misinformed.